You wouldn’t fly a plane with a cracked windshield and a flickering fuel gauge. Yet, thousands of marketing teams run high-budget campaigns every day using “broken” conversion data. When your tracking is off, your entire strategy is built on a foundation of sand.

In the world of GA4 and server-side tagging, “set it and forget it” is a myth. Tracking breaks due to site updates, privacy regulations, or simple API shifts. If you aren’t auditing your data regularly, you aren’t just losing insights—you’re actively wasting ad spend on the wrong audiences.

Here are the five critical signs that your conversion tracking is currently failing you.

1. GA4 and Google Ads Show Wildly Different Numbers

It is normal to see slight discrepancies between platforms due to different attribution models (Data-Driven vs. Last Non-Direct Click). However, if your Google Ads account reports 100 conversions while GA4 reports 40, you have a structural failure.

This often happens when the Google Tag (gtag.js) is firing correctly, but the GA4 configuration is blocked by a cookie consent banner or a faulty trigger in Google Tag Manager. Conversely, if Google Ads is undercounting, your “Enhanced Conversions” may not be passing the necessary hashed user data correctly.

The Fix: Compare raw event counts in the “Real-Time” reports of both platforms simultaneously. If one isn’t firing, the issue is likely your GTM trigger logic.

2. Conversion Rate Suddenly Dropped (or Spiked)

Unless you paused your ads or your website crashed, a 50% drop in conversion rate overnight is almost never a “marketing” problem—it’s a tracking problem. Similarly, a massive spike often indicates double-counting.

Double-counting usually occurs when a conversion tag is placed on both a button click and a “Thank You” page load. It can also happen if a user refreshes the confirmation page and your setup fails to filter out duplicate Transaction IDs.

Symptom	Likely Cause
Sudden Drop	Tag deleted during site update or CSS selector changed.
Sudden Spike	Duplicate tags or “Page Refresh” triggers.
Erratic Fluctuations	Intermittent JavaScript errors or slow-loading containers.

3. You’re Seeing “(not set)” Everywhere in Reports

In GA4, the (not set) value is the digital equivalent of a shrug. It means the platform knows an event happened but has no idea where it came from or what properties were attached to it.

If your “Session Source/Medium” or “Landing Page” reports are dominated by (not set), your tracking code is likely firing before the session data is fully initialized. This is common in single-page applications (SPAs) where the initial page view isn’t captured correctly.

The Takeaway: High levels of (not set) data make it impossible to calculate ROI accurately. You might be getting sales, but you won’t know which campaign drove them.

4. Enhanced Conversions Showing Low Match Rate

Google’s “Enhanced Conversions” is designed to recover lost data by using hashed first-party data (like email addresses). If your Google Ads dashboard shows a “Low” or “No Recent Data” status for Enhanced Conversions, you are losing the battle against privacy-centric browsing.

This usually breaks because the CSS Selectors used to grab the email address from the checkout page have changed. If your developer updated the checkout form, your GTM variable might be looking for a field that no longer exists.

Pro Tip: Switch from CSS Selectors to a Data Layer implementation. It is far more stable and won’t break every time you change a button color or font.

5. Purchases tracked but revenue is $0

There is nothing more frustrating than seeing 50 “Purchase” events in GA4 with a total revenue of $0.00. This is a classic Data Layer schema error.

For GA4 to record revenue, the value and currency parameters must be formatted exactly as expected. If your site sends the price as a string with a currency symbol (e.g., “$100”) instead of a clean integer/float (100.00), GA4 will often reject the value entirely.

Common Revenue Errors:

• Currency Mismatch: Sending data in EUR when the property is set to USD.
• Missing Arrays: Failing to nest items within the items array in the eCommerce schema.
• Syntax Issues: Using commas instead of periods for decimals.

The Cost of “Dirty” Data

In the age of AI-driven bidding, broken tracking is more than an inconvenience—it’s a financial drain. Google Ads’ “Smart Bidding” relies on your conversion data to learn who to target. If you feed the algorithm “dirty” data (doubled conversions or missing values), the AI will optimize for the wrong behavior, driving your CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) through the roof.

Is Your Tracking Future-Proof?

With the phase-out of third-party cookies and the rise of the Privacy Sandbox, client-side tracking is becoming less reliable by the day. Leading brands are moving toward Server-Side Tagging (sGTM) to regain control over their data, improve site speed, and ensure compliance with GDPR and CCPA.

Don’t let bad data dictate your marketing budget.

Take Action Today

If you’ve noticed any of the signs above, your data is likely compromised. Rawsoft specializes in cleaning up “spaghetti” tag configurations and building robust, privacy-compliant tracking engines.

[Get a Free TagPipes / Privacy Compliance Audit]

Let our experts scan your setup, identify the gaps, and provide a roadmap to 100% data accuracy.