Guide
Conversion tracking fails quietly. Sales keep coming, so nothing looks wrong, but Smart Bidding goes blind and spend drifts to the wrong campaigns. Here is how to catch it and what to do.
When tracking breaks, your store keeps taking orders, so revenue looks fine. What actually happens is that the ad platform stops receiving conversions, the algorithm loses its signal, and it starts optimising toward whatever it can still measure. By the time ROAS visibly drops, you have paid for weeks of misdirected budget.
The checks
A sudden drop to near-zero recorded conversions while store revenue holds steady is the clearest tell.
The distance between what Google reports and what your store recorded grows week over week rather than staying steady.
If organic and direct suddenly swallow traffic that used to be attributed to ads, click ids are being lost.
A theme update, a new checkout, or a thank-you-page change is the usual trigger. Line up the date the numbers moved with your deploys.
The durable fix
Pixel-based tracking breaks because it depends on a script running in a browser that is increasingly hostile to it. Server-side tracking does not. When the order is captured on your server and the conversion is reported from your server, a theme change or an ad blocker cannot silently take it down. That is the difference between tracking you have to babysit and tracking that holds.
Whatever you use, put a simple reconciliation in place: compare platform-reported conversions against store orders on a regular cadence. A widening gap is your smoke alarm. It is far cheaper to notice a break in a weekly check than in a quarterly ROAS review.
Trakt reports conversions server-side and reconciles against your real orders, so a broken pixel cannot cost you weeks of spend.