How to tell if your website tracking is actually set up right

The dangerous thing about broken tracking is that it never throws an error. The page loads, the tag is there, nothing looks wrong, and you carry on making decisions on numbers that are quietly missing a third of your sales. Here are 10 checks you can run yourself to find out whether your setup is really working.

Why this matters

If your tracking is under-counting, every downstream number is wrong: your cost per lead looks higher than it is, your best channel looks worse than it is, and your ad platforms optimise toward the wrong buyers. If it is over-counting, your ROAS looks great right up until it does not match the bank. Either way you are steering with a broken instrument. These checks tell you which.

The 10 checks

1. Does a test purchase or lead show up in GA4? Place a real test order or submit a form, then look in GA4 Realtime or DebugView. If it does not appear within a minute or two, something is broken between your site and Google.
2. Does the conversion event fire once, not zero or twice? Zero means it is missing. Twice means you are double counting and your revenue is inflated. Both are common on edited themes and multi-app stores.
3. Is the conversion marked as a Key event in GA4? If not, it will never appear in your conversions or Key events reports no matter how well it fires.
4. Do GA4 and your store or CRM roughly agree? A few percent gap is normal. A 20 to 40 percent gap means real data loss, usually iOS, ad blockers, or blocked tags.
5. Does tracking survive the cookie banner? Decline cookies and see how much still works. If everything stops dead, your Consent Mode is misconfigured and you are losing EU and UK data.
6. Does every purchase carry a value and a unique transaction ID? Missing values zero out your revenue. Duplicate IDs collapse orders and break deduplication.
7. Are your ad pixels sending conversions server-side too? Browser-only pixels lose a large share of conversions to iOS and blockers. A server-side or CAPI event recovers them.
8. Are your UTMs consistent? Messy or missing UTMs dump real traffic into Direct or Unassigned, making your channels impossible to trust.
9. Is Direct traffic suspiciously high? A large, growing Direct bucket is usually a tagging or referral problem, not genuinely unattributable visits.
10. Has anything changed since it was last checked? A theme update, a new app, a replatform, or a cookie tool swap can silently break tracking overnight. If nobody has verified it since, assume it needs checking.

What to do if a few of these fail

One red flag is worth fixing. Several usually means the setup needs a proper going over rather than a patch, because the causes tend to be linked: a broken data layer creates missing values, duplicate events and messy attribution all at once. That is what our audit is for. We check all of this against your live site by hand, tell you exactly what is wrong in plain English, and give you a fixed quote to fix it.

Datahound are analytics and ad-tracking specialists. We fix broken GA4, Google Tag Manager and server-side tracking so every sale, form and call gets counted. Back to datahound.agency