Ten minutes to find out whether your tracking is lying to you

Before anyone changes a bid, find out whether the numbers they would be changing it on are real. Every check below runs on accounts you already have.

1. Submit your own form

Go to your own site on your phone, fill in the contact form, and send it.

Start a timer. If nothing arrives in your inbox and your CRM within two minutes, stop reading and fix that.

This is the most common finding we have and it is the most expensive one. A broken form generates no complaints. The leads simply stop, the ads look like they stopped working, and somebody gets fired over a mail routing rule.

Do it once a month. Put it in your calendar.

2. Compare the platform count to your calendar

Open the ad platform. Note the conversions for last month. Now count the jobs you actually booked from ads in the same month.

If those two numbers are within shouting distance, good. If the platform says 240 and your calendar says 11, the account has been bidding toward something that is not a customer, and no amount of bid tuning fixes that.

3. Look for two of everything

View the source of your homepage and search for gtm.js.

If it appears twice with different container IDs, every event on that page is firing twice. Conversions double, cost per conversion halves, and the account looks like it is performing about twice as well as it is.

This happens when a new agency installs their container and nobody removes the old one. It is common and it is invisible until you look.

4. Watch the thank-you page

Submit the form again. When you land on the thank-you page, refresh it.

If your conversion count goes up on the refresh, the conversion is tied to the page load rather than to the submission, and every visitor who refreshes or bookmarks that page counts as a new lead.

5. Call your own number

Call the number on your website from your mobile.

Does it ring where it should? Does the call show up anywhere as a tracked event? Many service businesses take most of their real leads by phone and count none of them, then judge the campaign on the form fills only.

If the phone is where your business happens, the phone has to be in the count. Otherwise you are optimizing a channel on a minority of its own results.

6. Line up the platforms

Put last month's ad platform clicks next to the sessions your analytics recorded from that source.

They will never match exactly. Ad blockers, tracking prevention and different attribution windows guarantee a gap, and a difference of ten or twenty out of a hundred is normal.

A difference of half is not normal. That is a tag that is not firing on some template, or a redirect that strips the parameters, or a consent banner blocking the tag until an interaction most visitors never make.

What to do with what you find

Write down what each check returned, with the date next to it. That page is now the most useful document about your marketing that anybody owns, including whoever currently runs it.

If all six come back clean, your tracking is in better shape than most and your problem is somewhere else. That is genuinely useful to know, and it costs you ten minutes to find out.

If you would rather have someone else run this and the twenty checks that come after it, that is the free audit. Findings come back in 24 hours and they are yours either way.

• tracking
• attribution