Conversion tracking that survives contact with reality
Every platform grades its own homework. This is the work of counting a sale once, and knowing which click to thank for it.
Add up the conversions your platforms report and you get more sales than you actually made. Everyone in the room knows it. Nobody knows by how much.
The gap
What the platform says, and what happened.
Both columns are usually true at the same time. That is the problem: nobody is lying, and the numbers still do not add up.
What the reports say
- Google claims the sale, because the customer clicked a search ad first
- Meta claims the same sale, because they saw a video two days earlier
- A phone call is counted as a conversion whether it lasted nine seconds or nine minutes
- The refund never reaches the ad account, so the revenue figure stays high
- An ad blocker eats the tag, and a real sale is never counted at all
What we set up instead
- One record per sale, held in your systems rather than in a platform's
- The click that produced it kept with it, so a channel can be credited or not
- Calls counted only past a length you choose, because a wrong number is not a lead
- Refunds and cancellations sent back, so the reported return falls when the real one does
- Server side measurement, so a blocked browser tag no longer means a lost sale
What changes
Three arguments you stop having.
Which channel to credit
One number per channel, agreed in advance, with the rule written down. The rule can be argued with. The arithmetic cannot.
Whether to spend more
A cost per customer you would be willing to show your accountant, so a decision to double a budget is a decision rather than a hope.
What a lead is worth
Traced past the enquiry to the invoice, so the campaigns that bring people who pay stop being funded at the same rate as the ones that bring people who ask.
What is included
The whole chain, not the easy half.
- Conversion actions defined once and imported into Google Ads and Meta
- Server side tagging, so measurement survives ad blockers and browser restrictions
- Google Enhanced Conversions and the Meta Conversions API, with hashing before anything leaves your server
- Call tracking with a minimum duration, where the phone is a real channel for you
- Offline conversion import, so a sale closed by a person still reaches the platform that bought the click
- Refund and cancellation feedback, so the numbers go down when the money does
- A de-duplication rule, written down, for the sales two platforms both claim
The taxi company we did this for got 27% more booking calls at 56% less cost per call. We changed no adverts in the first month. We changed what counted as a call worth having.
An Australian taxi company, 2025
Questions people ask
The ones that actually arrive.
Will our numbers go down?
Yes, and that is the point. The first honest month usually reports fewer conversions than the month before, because it stops counting the same sale twice. The money coming in does not change. What changes is that the figure you plan with is now the one that matches the bank.
Is sending hashed emails to Google and Meta safe?
It is hashed on our server before it leaves, and it goes to those two and nowhere else. It is the minimum the platforms accept to match a conversion they were charged for. The alternative is undercounting, which teaches their bidding the wrong lesson and costs you money quietly.
We use a booking tool on another domain. Does that break it?
It breaks most installs, and it is one of the first things we check. Cross domain measurement is ordinary work, but it has to be done deliberately, and almost nobody does it by accident.
How long does it take?
Two to four weeks for most businesses. Longer where a sale is closed by a person days after the click, because then we are building a path from your sales records back to the advertising, and that path has to be right rather than quick.
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Your turn
Bring one question you cannot currently answer.
30 minutes. We will tell you whether it is measurable, roughly what it would take, and whether we are the right people for it.