Tracking and analytics
Almost every business we look at is making decisions on numbers that are wrong in a direction nobody has checked.
That is not usually incompetence. Tracking gets set up once, then the website changes, the booking system changes, a consent banner arrives, someone adds a tag and nobody goes back to see whether it still measures the right thing.
Why your platforms disagree with each other
They are all telling the truth from their own point of view, which is the problem.
| Source | What it actually counts |
|---|---|
| Meta | A conversion if someone saw an ad and later converted, within its own attribution window, using its own definition of who saw it |
| Conversions on its own definition, which differs from Meta's | |
| Google Analytics | Differently again, with its own view of what a session is |
| Your booking system | Actual bookings. The only one of those that is money |
Add a consent banner and a proportion of the data disappears entirely. Add a conversion that fires on a button click rather than on the confirmed booking and every abandoned attempt gets counted as a success. So the platforms disagree, everyone picks the number that suits their argument and budget decisions get made on the most flattering version.
What we do
Reliable measurement supports conversion improvements and multi-location decisions. See the reporting work with Six by Nico, or start with a Growth Audit.
- Audit what is currently measured
- Every tag, every event, every conversion action. What it fires on, whether it fires once or several times and whether it matches anything real.
- Reconcile against reality
- We compare what each platform claims against what your booking system, ecommerce platform or CRM actually recorded for the same period. The gap is the finding. Sometimes it is small. Frequently it is not.
- Fix the conversion definitions
- A conversion should be the outcome, not the intention. If a booking is confirmed in your booking system, that is the conversion. Not the click on "Book now", not the arrival on a thank you page that people also reach by other routes.
- Connect the offline outcome
- Where the sale completes somewhere the website cannot see, in a booking platform, a CRM or over the phone, we work out how to get that outcome back into the advertising platforms so bidding optimises against real revenue.
- GA4 setup
- Configured to answer your commercial questions rather than left on defaults, with the custom dimensions and events you actually need registered properly.
- UTM discipline
- A consistent scheme applied everywhere, so channel reporting means something.
- Server side measurement
- Where it genuinely improves data quality and is proportionate. We do not implement it as a default, because it adds complexity and cost and is not always worth it.
- Documentation
- Written down, so the next person does not have to reverse engineer it.
Consent and privacy
If you already have a consent setup that works, we do not rip it out. We verify what it does, confirm the data flows are behaving correctly and only recommend changes where there is a specific problem.
We implement consent so that measurement degrades honestly when someone declines, rather than being quietly bypassed. Where consent reduces what you can see, we tell you what the gap is rather than filling it in and presenting an estimate as fact.
What we will not do
- Set up tracking designed to make the reporting look good
- Count the same conversion in three places and present the total
- Fire conversions on proxy actions when the real outcome is measurable
- Tell you attribution is solved, because it is not, for anyone
What we can give you is numbers whose limitations are known and stated. That is genuinely different from what most businesses have.
How we hand it over
What we need from you
- Admin access to your analytics, tag manager and advertising accounts
- Access to whatever records the actual sale
- Someone technical on your side or on your website provider's side, for anything requiring a code change
- A clear answer on what outcomes matter commercially, because we are going to measure those specifically
Common questions
Find out what your numbers are actually telling you
The Growth Audit assesses tracking as one of its five pillars and it is usually where the biggest single finding is. Book a call if you already know this is your problem.