Is your conversion tracking broken? 4 checks to run in Meta and Google

Earlier this year, we audited the conversion tracking setups of 500 of the UK's top-performing Shopify brands. 98% of them had broken tracking (and most of them won't even know it). 

Broken tracking rarely shows up as a blank dashboard or a ROAS of zero. Instead, it hides in a match score nobody checks, a server-side coverage line sitting under Meta's threshold, or a Google Ads goal that's been flagged "needs attention" for months.

But the cost is anything but quiet. 

Your tracking decides how well Meta and Google can attribute conversions, how precisely they bid and how big your retargeting audiences get. If you’re investing heavily in paid media, a 1% loss of conversions could be costing you six figures a year.

Below are 4 checks you can run in your own accounts today, so you can see exactly where your setup stands against gold standard - and what to fix first.

Check 1: Event Match Quality in Meta Events Manager

Where to look: Meta Events Manager › your dataset › the Event match quality column.

Better Event Match Quality (EMQ) means that events are more likely to match to a Meta account. Matched events help you attribute conversions to your ads and deliver them to people who are more likely to convert, which can result in better ad performance and lower cost per action.

A weak setup

In the setup above, fewer people and clicks are being matched to conversion events triggered on the website. The impact is fewer attributed conversions against your ads (meaning slower learning), less precise targeting and smaller retargeting audiences. This ultimately results in poorer channel performance.

'Purchase' should always have the highest score, as more customer information is collected at the checkout than on other events.

Gold standard

In this gold standard setup, we can see higher EMQ scores, as well as additional events on the server (Conversions API) which can be used for enhanced insights and to drive different conversion objectives to the standard purchase event.

🚩 Red flags: upper-funnel scores sitting around 5/10 with an "Update recommended" warning.

Check 2: Customer information parameters in Meta Events Manager

Where to look: Meta Events Manager › click into an event (start with Purchase) › Event match quality › Shared parameters.

The customer information parameters you send on the conversion event data packets from your website to the ad platforms are crucial for attribution to the ad click and the person clicking. The more information you send, the better your attribution.

Not all parameters are created equal for matching. Things like email address are the priority, but also one of the hardest things to collect on upper-funnel events.

A weak setup

Gold standard

In the gold standard setup, we can see much fuller coverage of customer, cookie and click parameters. The real challenge is maximising this on upper-funnel events.

Leaf Signal's first-party solution means fewer cookies and clicks are blocked, and event data is enriched to legitimately maximise the volume of customer information sent to the ad platforms.

That means more events can be captured, and those events are richer in customer and ad click information. This results in better attribution, better targeting optimisation (bidding) and larger retargeting pools.

🚩 Red flags: no email or phone on Purchase, or a click ID (fbc) on only a small share of events.

Check 3: Server-side (CAPI) event coverage in Meta Events Manager

Where to look: Meta Events Manager › click into an event (start with PageView) › Event coverage.

Server-side coverage is key for recovering conversions that would otherwise have been lost because they weren't processed on the browser. Dig into this further and you'll see that many of these conversions are lost on the browser on iOS devices. Server-side coverage is crucial for capturing them.

A weak setup

The coverage here is poor, meaning lost conversions against this event. The key result is smaller web visitor retargeting audiences.

Gold standard

This setup sits consistently above Meta's minimum threshold for event coverage.

Capturing upper-funnel events on the server is more challenging than capturing purchase events, for many reasons. In short, the PageView event is high-volume (including bot traffic), with more margin for error in data quality.

Superior data flow at this level requires highly technical engineering expertise and many years of experience with server-side technologies. It's far more complex than web development.

🚩 Red flags: coverage below Meta's 75% goal, or a line that dips under it regularly.

Check 4: Conversion goals in Google Ads

Where to look: Google Ads › Goals › Conversions › Summary, then open your Purchase goal.

Above, you can see Leaf Signal compared with the Google Shopping app and Google Analytics. Leaf Signal is attributing significantly more purchase conversions and more conversion value (in this case, purchase revenue) over a 30-day window than the other solutions.

That's with a smaller attribution window, too. The Google Shopping app and GA4 are both set to 90-day click windows; Leaf Signal is set to 30-day click.

Gold standard vs a weak setup

These two diagnostics panels show why. Fundamentally, the gold-standard setup (top) is capturing more events (server-side coverage) and enriching those events with more ad click, customer and product information, right across the full funnel of events.

🚩 Red flags: a "Needs attention" status on your primary conversion action, Enhanced Conversions missing from the diagnostics, or GA4 doing the job of your conversion source.

How did you score?

If your accounts look more like the weak setups than the gold-standard ones, you're in the majority. In fact, of the 500 brands we audited, 75.8% had at least 3 critical tracking issues at once.

As Meta and Google automate more of the targeting and bidding, the quality of the signals you feed them sets the ceiling on everything downstream: attribution, bidding efficiency, retargeting audience size, and ultimately CAC and ROAS.

The upside is that tracking is one of the few levers left that you fully control. Get it right, and every pound you put into Meta and Google starts working harder from the very first click.

Want to know where your setup stands? Book a free tracking audit and we'll show you exactly what's broken and what it's costing you.

Want the full picture? Download the UK State of Tracking 2026 report for the breakdown by issue, vertical and platform.