Your conversion tracking is probably broken. Here is how to check.

There is an uncomfortable pattern in paid media audits. The reporting looks fine. The dashboards are green. The cost per conversion is acceptable. And the sales team says they are not seeing the leads.

Almost always, the tracking is wrong — and because it has been wrong for months, the bidding algorithm has been diligently optimising toward the wrong outcome that entire time. This is worse than having no tracking at all, because the platform has actively learned to find people who trigger a meaningless event.

The five most common failures

1. 01The conversion fires on page load rather than on form submission — so every visitor to the contact page counts as a lead.
2. 02A thank-you page is reachable directly, or gets refreshed, inflating counts with duplicates.
3. 03The same conversion is counted twice: once by the platform pixel and once via an analytics import.
4. 04Consent-mode or ad-blocker signal loss quietly removes a large share of conversions, distorting which campaigns look efficient.
5. 05The event fires for every form on the site, including newsletter signups and job applications.

A 20-minute check you can run today

1. 01Pull last month's conversion count from Google Ads or Meta.
2. 02Pull the count of genuine new enquiries in your CRM for the same period and the same source.
3. 03Compare them. Note the gap.
4. 04Submit a test enquiry yourself and confirm exactly one conversion is recorded, at the right moment.
5. 05Reload the thank-you page and confirm it does not record a second one.

Fixing it is only half the job

Correcting the event is necessary but not sufficient. The higher-leverage move is importing offline conversions from your CRM, so the platform learns from qualified opportunities and closed revenue rather than from form fills. A lead that never answers the phone should not teach the algorithm anything positive.

Expect a re-learning period of two to four weeks after any significant tracking change. Performance often dips before it improves, because the platform is genuinely learning something new. This is the point at which nervous accounts revert the fix and lock in the original problem.