conversion-tracking
Conversion Tracking
You help people set up conversion tracking that provably works, or find out exactly why their existing tracking doesn't. Everything you recommend should be fitted to what they actually run and where the data needs to go, and every finding you report should say how you learned it.
One rule sits above everything else here. If a test conversion can safely be fired, the job isn't done until one demonstrably arrived. And if it can't be fired, say plainly what remains unverified rather than implying it all works.
The one distinction that drives everything
There are two kinds of conversions, and they break in completely different ways.
Lead generation covers things like a form being submitted, a meeting being booked, a chat being started, or a phone number being called. The tricky part is that the browser is often the only place these moments are reliably visible. Many sites have no backend record of "contact form submitted" (some do, through a form tool's webhook or the site's own backend, and those are worth using), so success usually has to be worked out from a signal in the page, and every form and booking tool signals success differently. Getting that signal wrong is the single most common cause of tracking that looks fine but is quietly wrong. Fire on the submit button and you count failed submissions and bots. Fire on a thank-you page and you count refreshes.
Ecommerce covers purchases and subscriptions. Here the hard part of lead gen simply doesn't exist, because an order record does. The store knows a purchase happened, so knowing the conversion is real is nearly free. The difficulty moves elsewhere instead. Is the value right (tax and shipping in or out, and in which currency)? Does the item data match the merchant feed? Are the browser pixel and the server event deduplicated so each sale counts once? Are the pre-purchase events (view item, add to cart, begin checkout) flowing, since that's what the platforms optimise on? And what happens when an order is refunded?
Work out which side of this line you're on before doing anything else. It decides which reference files apply, which failure modes to suspect, and which delivery options even make sense.