Attribution first: fixing tracking before you spend

Every budget decision downstream of broken tracking is a guess. Where to start.

Roughly two thirds of the advertising accounts we audit cannot trace an enquiry back to its source. The dashboard is full, the reports are confident, and none of it is load-bearing. Every decision made above that layer — which channel to grow, which to cut, what a lead is worth — is a guess dressed as analysis.

The uncomfortable part is that this is usually not a tooling problem. The tags are installed. They are just measuring the wrong events.

The four failures we find most often

Conversions counted on page view rather than form submission, inflating volume by an order of magnitude

Thank-you page fires that also trigger on refresh, so one enquiry counts three times

No offline conversion import, so a qualified lead that closed by phone never reaches the ad platform

Cross-domain tracking broken between the site and a third-party booking or checkout system

Each of these skews in a different direction, which is why the numbers look plausible. Inflated conversions make a weak channel look strong; missing offline data makes a strong channel look weak. The two can cancel out well enough that nobody questions the total.

If your tracking is wrong, more budget does not buy more customers. It buys a faster route to the wrong conclusion.

Fix the measurement before the spend

We do not touch bids in the first two weeks of an account. The order is deliberate: define what a conversion actually is with the client, instrument it, verify it against their own CRM records, and only then look at performance. It feels slow to a client who wants leads this month. It is the only sequence that produces decisions you can defend.

What good looks like

One agreed definition of a qualified lead, written down, that marketing and sales both accept

Conversions verified against CRM records for a full month before optimisation begins

Offline outcomes imported back so the platform learns from closed revenue, not form fills

A single dashboard where the lead count reconciles with the CRM to within a few percent

Once that exists, the rest of the work gets easier and cheaper. Reallocation decisions become obvious rather than contested, and the monthly review stops being an argument about whose numbers are right.

Not sure your tracking is telling the truth?

Send us access and we will audit attribution end to end. If it is sound, we will tell you and charge you nothing.

Talk to Us Digital Marketing

All articles Next: Ads articles