What a conversion tracking audit checks
A conversion tracking audit answers one question: when someone becomes a lead on your site, does every platform you are paying actually find out? This scan is the automated half of that audit. It loads your site the way a visitor does and records which tags fire, which do not, and which we simply cannot see from the browser.
We ran this scan across 7,000+ home-services businesses and published what we found.
- Google Ads conversion tag — whether a conversion is reported back to the account that is spending the money.
- GA4 — whether behaviour on the site is being recorded at all.
- Google Tag Manager — whether a container is present, and the limits of what that tells us.
- Meta pixel — whether Facebook and Instagram campaigns can attribute a lead.
- What we could not confirm — consent gating and server-side tagging both make a correctly measured site look quiet. We say so instead of calling it broken.
What does this audit look for?
Most tracking problems are not obvious from the outside. A site can look fine and still be sending bad or incomplete data to the platforms that run the ads. This audit loads your page in a real browser, watches the network requests that fire, and reports what we can and cannot confirm.
Google Ads conversion tracking is the tag that tells Google Ads a visitor actually became a lead or customer. Without it, the campaign is optimizing for clicks, not for jobs. You can still spend money, but you cannot tell which keyword, ad, or audience produced the work.
GA4 records what happens on the site itself: page views, events, traffic sources, and the path a visitor takes. It is not a conversion tag on its own, but it is the layer that lets you see whether traffic is turning into action. If it is missing, you are flying blind on behavior.
Google Tag Manager is the container that deploys many of these tags. Seeing GTM installed does not mean the right tags are inside it, but not seeing GTM usually means tags are hard-coded, outdated, or managed by a developer for every small change.
Meta pixel does the same job for Facebook and Instagram campaigns: reporting conversions, building audiences, and enabling retargeting. If it is absent, Meta cannot attribute purchases or leads back to the ad that drove them.
Why can a tag be installed and still not fire?
A common mistake is assuming that because a tag was added once, it is working now. In practice, tags fail to fire for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the code is on the page.
Consent banners are the most frequent culprit. If a visitor has not accepted cookies, many tag managers suppress analytics and advertising tags by default. The code is present, but the trigger never runs. Our scan does not click accept, so we report exactly what an unconsented visitor sees.
Server-side tagging moves the event stream off the browser entirely. The page sends data to a first-party endpoint, and that endpoint forwards it to Google or Meta. From the browser's point of view, almost nothing is visible. A site using server-side tagging can be fully measured even when our audit sees very little.
Tags inside Google Tag Manager also fire only when their trigger conditions are met. A conversion tag might be configured to fire on a thank-you page that no longer exists, or on a button click that has a different CSS class than the one the trigger expects. The container loads, but the event never records.
That is why every result includes a caveat and an "unknown" state. We are not declaring your tracking broken. We are declaring what we could see from one real browser load, so you know where to look next.
How do I check my conversion tracking myself?
You do not need special tools to do a quick sanity check. Start inside the ad platform, then confirm on the site itself.
- In Google Ads, go to Goals → Conversions. Look at the "Last conversion" column for each action. If it is blank, no conversion has been recorded recently. That is the fastest signal that something is wrong.
- Open your site in Chrome and run Tag Assistant (the new version works as a browser tab, the legacy version as an extension). It lists every Google tag that fires and flags errors or missing conversions.
- Open the browser's Network tab, reload the page, and filter for "collect" or "/tr". These are the request paths GA4 and Meta use to send event data. If nothing appears on a page where a tag should fire, the tag did not send.
If all three checks look healthy, your tracking is probably in decent shape. If any of them is empty or throwing errors, the next step is to compare the tag setup against the actual pages and buttons on your site.
What should I do if nothing is firing?
First, check whether the tags are deployed through Google Tag Manager. If they are, open Preview mode, visit your site, and watch whether the tags trigger. A tag that appears but does not fire usually means the trigger is pointing at the wrong page, form, or button.
Next, look at your consent management setup. If the banner is set to block advertising and analytics cookies by default, those tags will not fire until a visitor opts in. That is a valid choice, but it should be a deliberate one, not an accident.
If the tags are hard-coded on the page, check whether they are still loading from the right container or pixel ID. It is common for an old agency ID, a deleted container, or a staging configuration to survive on a live site for months.
Finally, consider whether server-side tagging is in play. If your developer or agency set up a server container, the browser will look quiet even when everything is working. The way to confirm that is to trace the server endpoint, not the page.
If you are still unsure, run the scan above again with a specific page URL and compare the result. One load is a snapshot; two or three loads on different pages start to tell a story.
Conversion tracking audit services
The scan above is automated and it stops where the browser stops. A full audit is manual work: we open the ad accounts alongside the site, trace each conversion action back to the event that is supposed to trigger it, and find the ones that fire on a page that no longer exists or never fire at all.
That work is done in-house. For clients where the measurement has to survive consent gating and browser restrictions, we implement server-side tagging rather than relying on the browser to report the conversion. It is the same work we do on our own accounts.
If you want a person to do this rather than a scanner, get in touch.