How do I know if my conversion tracking is broken?

The symptoms

Google Ads reports conversions your sales team never saw. Analytics shows thousands of sessions and a conversion rate near zero. Two reports disagree and nobody can explain the gap. Numbers changed sharply on a date that matches a site deploy rather than anything you did in market.

The dangerous case is not zero data. It is plausible data that is wrong, because nobody investigates a number that looks reasonable.

The usual causes

A site rebuild shipped without the tags being carried across. A tag firing on page load rather than on the action it is meant to measure, so every visitor counts as a conversion. The same tag installed twice, once hardcoded and once through Tag Manager, doubling everything. Consent banners blocking tags before they fire. A thank-you page that changed URL while the trigger still points at the old one.

How to check

Start with the page source and see which tags are actually present. Our free tracking checker reads a URL and reports the analytics and advertising tags it finds, which catches the obvious cases: nothing installed, a stale Universal Analytics tag, pixels with no analytics behind them.

Source alone cannot tell you whether the events fire on the right actions. For that you need to open the accounts: complete a real conversion yourself and watch whether it appears, check the trigger conditions in Tag Manager, and reconcile a week of platform-reported conversions against actual records in your CRM.

The number that settles it

Pick a week. Count the real leads or orders in your own records. Compare that to what each platform claims. If those two numbers do not reconcile, every optimisation decision made on the platform number was made on fiction.