Paid Advertising
Before optimising an ad account, confirm that its conversion numbers reconcile with your own records. The most common distortions are conversions firing on page reload, the same action tracked by two tags, attribution windows compared across different periods, and offline outcomes the platform cannot see.
Campaign optimisation is a process of moving budget toward what works. If the measurement is wrong, that process reliably moves budget toward whatever is best at generating false positives.
This is why we audit tracking before touching structure or bids. It is also why an account can look like it is improving while the sales team reports no change.
If the conversion tag sits on a thank-you page reachable by URL, every refresh, bookmark visit and back-button press counts again. The fix is to fire on the submission event rather than the page view, or to deduplicate on a transaction identifier.
A form plugin fires its own event, Tag Manager fires another, and the platform counts both. This is easy to miss because the number looks plausible — just consistently generous.
Audit every tag that can fire on the same action, and pick one source of truth per conversion.
Comparing a platform's default attribution against analytics using last-click over a different lookback produces two numbers that were never meant to match. Neither is wrong; they answer different questions.
Agree which definition you report on, state it in every report, and do not change it mid-engagement.
For businesses that close by phone or in person, the platform sees a form fill and nothing after it. Enquiries that never became customers look identical to the ones that did.
Feeding qualified-lead status back — through offline conversion imports or a CRM integration — is the single change that most improves paid performance for lead-generation businesses.
Once a month, count the enquiries your business actually received and compare against what the platforms reported. If they diverge, find out why before the next optimisation decision.
Written by the CodeActivator Team. We publish what we learn running search, development, paid media and social work for clients and agency partners.
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