We audited about 20 ad accounts. Half had tracking that was lying.

Before we change a bid or a budget, we check whether the numbers can be trusted. Across roughly 20 recent audits, about half of the accounts had tracking problems serious enough to change how the account should be managed.

What we found

The problems were rarely dramatic. They were small gaps that added up. In one account, the ad platform reported 15 demos while the CRM showed 17 total paid leads. In others, paid demos showed up in the CRM as "Direct", or most leads were tagged "offline source".

Native CRM attribution was only about 50% accurate in one account we reviewed. That meant half the decisions about which campaigns to scale were based on the wrong data.

Why it matters

Ad platforms optimize toward whatever you tell them is a conversion. If that signal is wrong, the algorithm gets very good at finding the wrong people. Fixing tracking is usually the fastest way to improve results without spending more.

The checklist

• Every conversion action fires once, on the right page, with the right value
• Server-side events are set up and match quality is checked
• CRM lifecycle stages are defined and used by sales
• Paid leads keep their source through to the CRM
• Offline conversions are imported back to the ad platforms
• Platform numbers are reconciled with CRM or store numbers every month

Our Conversion Tracking QA Agent now runs these checks daily, and an attribution engineer reviews every flag.