Staying measurable through a tracking break

The challenge

The brand was spending heavily on Google and Meta. After a change to the store's checkout flow, the browser conversion pixel quietly stopped firing on the thank-you page. Sales kept coming, so nothing looked wrong on the surface, but the ad platforms stopped receiving conversions and Smart Bidding lost its signal. Spend kept flowing while the algorithm optimised on stale data.

The approach

Because Trakt captures the order server-side, straight from the store, and reports conversions from its own servers, it was never dependent on the pixel that broke. The recovered conversions went back to Google and Meta with the click id attached, and every attributed sale was reconciled against the orders that actually landed in the store. The team could see, in one place, which campaigns were still paying for themselves while the native reporting was blind.

The result

ROAS became measurable again in days rather than waiting on a pixel fix, and roughly a third of orders that the browser pixel had been missing were recovered and reported server-side. Bidding had a complete signal to optimise on, and the brand had a single number it could act on instead of three that disagreed.

A note on the numbers

Trakt and the ad platforms will rarely show the same ROAS, and that is expected. They use different attribution windows, different credit models, and count sales on different dates. The point of this engagement was not to claim a bigger number, it was to keep the brand measurable and honest when its native tracking could not. We reconcile against real orders precisely so the differences are explainable rather than mysterious.