How to detect broken conversion tracking

What is broken conversion tracking?

Conversion tracking is broken when the events reported by your website no longer accurately represent the conversions that actually happened.

For example, your store might record 50 completed purchases in Stripe while your tracking system sends only 41 purchase events. Nothing is necessarily wrong with checkout. Nine conversions simply failed to reach the systems relying on your tracking data.

Common signs your conversion tracking is broken

Tracking problems usually show up as discrepancies rather than complete failures. Watch for these patterns:

• Missing conversions. Your payment or backend system records more conversions than your tracking events.
• Duplicate conversions. One purchase creates two or more purchase events.
• Incorrect conversion values. The event fires, but the reported value does not match the real transaction.
• Missing or incorrect currency. Revenue is reported using the wrong currency or without one.
• Transaction ID problems. IDs are missing, duplicated, or inconsistent between systems.
• Sudden tracking drops. Conversion volume falls sharply even though actual sales remain relatively stable.

Why conversion tracking breaks

Conversion tracking depends on several pieces of your website and marketing stack working together. A change to any one of them can introduce a tracking issue.

Common causes include:

• website or checkout deployments
• tag manager changes
• incorrect event triggers
• JavaScript errors
• duplicate tags or pixels
• checkout redirects
• server-side integration changes
• incorrect event parameters
• consent configuration changes

This is why a tracking setup that worked correctly yesterday can quietly become unreliable after an unrelated website change.

How to check whether your conversion tracking is broken

1. Start with your source of truth

First determine how many real conversions actually happened. For an ecommerce business, this could be completed payments in Stripe or another backend order system.

Do not start with Meta Ads or Google Ads. Those systems receive conversion data. You need something independent to compare against.

2. Count the conversion events your website sent

Next, inspect the purchase or lead events produced by your tracking implementation during the same period.

Compare the number of unique tracked conversions with the number of real conversions.

3. Compare transaction IDs

Counts alone can hide problems. Compare individual transaction identifiers between the source of truth and your tracking events.

Each real conversion should normally correspond to one unique conversion event.

A transaction with no matching event indicates a potentially missing conversion. Multiple events sharing the same transaction can indicate duplicate tracking.

4. Compare value and currency

An event firing does not automatically mean it is correct. Compare the value and currency reported by the tracking event with the actual transaction.

A $120 purchase reported as $12 is still a tracking failure, even though the purchase event technically fired.

5. Repeat the comparison continuously

A one-time test tells you whether tracking works at that moment. It does not tell you whether it will still work after tomorrow's deployment, tag change, checkout update, or configuration change.

Reliable tracking requires ongoing comparison between real conversions and the events your website reports.

Why checking Meta or Google Ads is not enough

Ad platforms are useful for campaign reporting, but they should not be the place where you first discover that your tracking implementation broke.

Their reported numbers can also differ because of attribution windows, modeling, reporting delays, and platform-specific rules.

The more direct test is simpler: did each real conversion produce the tracking event you expected, with the correct transaction data?

How SignalLeak detects tracking problems

SignalLeak continuously compares actual conversions with the conversion events produced by your website.

Instead of waiting for someone to notice unusual numbers in an ad platform, SignalLeak watches for mismatches such as missing conversions, duplicate events, incorrect values, currency problems, and transaction ID issues.

When the two sides stop matching, SignalLeak creates an incident so the problem can be investigated before unreliable tracking data goes unnoticed for hours or days.

Frequently asked questions

How do I know if conversion tracking is working?

Compare real conversions from an independent source of truth with the conversion events generated by your website. Check transaction IDs, values, currencies, and event counts rather than relying only on an ad platform's reported total.

Why are some of my conversions missing?

Missing conversions can be caused by broken event triggers, JavaScript errors, checkout changes, tag configuration, integration failures, or other changes in the path between a completed conversion and the tracking event.

Can conversion tracking break suddenly?

Yes. A previously working implementation can break after a website deployment, checkout update, tag manager change, or integration change.

How often should conversion tracking be checked?

Continuously where possible. Manual audits are useful, but they only confirm that tracking worked when the audit was performed.