Every paid media decision gets made against a number: cost per lead, cost per sale, return on ad spend. If that number isn't accurate, every decision built on top of it is wrong too, even if the campaigns themselves are well built. Here's where conversion tracking most commonly breaks down.
Duplicate conversion events
The most common issue we find is the same conversion firing twice: once from a page load and once from a form submission event, or once from Google Ads and once from Google Analytics with both feeding into the same reported total. The result is a lead count that looks roughly double what actually happened, and a cost-per-lead that looks roughly half what it should be.
Form views counted as leads
A conversion action set up to fire when someone views a form, rather than when they submit it, will report every visitor who scrolled past the form as a lead. This is easy to miss because the number looks healthy, and nobody questions a metric that's going in the right direction.
No distinction between a lead and a qualified lead
Not every form submission is a genuine enquiry. Spam, wrong-number calls, and people who were clearly never going to buy all get counted the same as a real, sales-ready lead unless tracking is set up to separate them. Without that distinction, a business can be paying to acquire clicks that were never going to become customers, while the reporting says otherwise.
No link between ad platform data and what actually happened
Google Ads and Meta can tell you a lead came in. They can't tell you whether that lead became a paying client, unless that information is fed back in through offline conversion imports or a CRM integration. Without that link, budget often ends up optimised toward the campaigns generating the most leads, not the campaigns generating the most revenue, and those aren't always the same campaigns.
What accurate tracking looks like
Good tracking answers one question reliably: for every pound spent, what did the business actually get back? That means conversion actions that count genuine enquiries only, deduplicated event firing, and a feedback loop from sales or CRM data back into the ad platforms so optimisation is based on outcomes, not just activity.