Why conversion tracking can never be a 'set-and-forget' task

Brands invest thousands - sometimes millions - in paid media every year. And how that investment performs depends on one thing: the quality of the data flowing from your website into your ad platforms.

Conversion tracking is the mechanism that sends platforms like Meta and Google the signals they need to optimise campaigns, build audiences, allocate budgets and report performance.

Product views. Add-to-carts. Checkout starts. Purchases. These signals power everything.

Tracking is the core, but it’s fragile. Really fragile. So even if you set it up perfectly today, it won’t stay perfect for long. 

Some brands and tech treat implementation as a one-off project - a 'set it up and walk away' job. But the reality is that tracking doesn’t stay fixed just because it was installed correctly once.

It breaks, frequently and silently. And when it does, your ad platforms lose visibility and performance suffers - usually long before anyone on your team realises. 

Conversion tracking can never be a 'set-and-forget' task. Here’s why.

1. Tracking breaks (and you probably won’t even notice)

Most tracking failures don’t happen with a big red error message. They happen quietly, in the background, triggered by everyday changes to your site.

A theme update.

A CRO test.

A new Shopify app.

An updated checkout.

A small DOM change in a template someone pushed live at 4:57pm.

Any of these can stop your events from firing, strip out data parameters, or break deduplication.

These are silent breaks. The kinds of issues that don’t show up until your retargeting audience shrinks, your ROAS drops, or someone randomly notices that a purchase event hasn’t fired in two months.

This is the number one reason tracking can’t be left alone. Your site changes constantly, and your tracking has to keep up.

2. Manual QA isn’t scalable

For years, our data services team manually checked clients’ tracking every single day.

Every key event. Every tag. Every site.

It worked - until it didn’t.

As the number of brands and tags grew, the workload exploded. Manually testing every event on every site simply wasn’t scalable. And that’s the reality for most brands today. You can test tracking at launch… but you can’t manually test it every day forever.

Most issues are only discovered when:

• performance suddenly drops

• a dashboard looks a bit “off”

• someone manually tests a checkout flow and notices something weird

By the time that happens, you’ve usually lost weeks of performance - and potentially thousands in ad budget.

Manual QA isn’t sustainable. Always-on, AI-powered monitoring is the only effective solution.

3. Ad platforms keep evolving

Performance marketers are always kept on their toes by the likes of Meta, Google and TikTok, platforms that frequently update their conversion APIs, recommended events, deduplication rules and data requirements. What counted as “best practice” six months ago isn’t necessarily enough today.

If you aren’t actively maintaining your setup, your tracking accuracy slowly decays.

Your signals become weaker, and platform algorithms have less to work with. This is the invisible drift that eats away at paid media profitability.

4. Browsers & privacy standards never stand still

Safari and Firefox continue to tighten tracking protections. Chrome is phasing out third-party cookies. Regulatory expectations around consent and data handling continue to evolve.

All of this impacts how long identifiers last, how audiences are built, and how reliably conversion paths can be stitched together. Tracking that worked perfectly in 2023 may struggle today if it hasn’t been updated.

It’s a compliance issue too. Requirements around user privacy and data storage change regularly. If your tracking setup isn’t aligned with the latest standards, you’re at risk of falling out of compliance - and being audited as a result.

5. Weak tracking = Weak campaigns (and wasted budget)

When tracking slips, even slightly, your ad platforms lose visibility into what’s driving performance. That means:

• weaker optimisation

• smaller retargeting pools

• bad bidding decisions

• inflated or misleading reporting

• wasted media spend

And because these issues usually start small and grow over time, most teams don’t realise tracking is the root cause. They blame the algorithm. The CPMs. The creative. The market.

But often, it’s the signals.

Conversion tracking is living infrastructure

Tracking isn’t a ‘set-and-forget’ project - it’s infrastructure.

And like any piece of infrastructure, it needs maintenance and monitoring (and rapid intervention when things break).

That’s exactly why we built Watcher - to provide automated monitoring that catches silent failures the moment they happen, and ensures conversion data stays complete, reliable, and flowing 24/7. It’s also why every Leaf Signal client gets hands-on support from our data engineers when issues arise.

If you want to know how your tracking is performing right now, we can help.

Book your free tracking audit, and we’ll review your setup, flag issues, and give you clear, actionable steps to improve accuracy and performance.