Tracking & tagging
The unglamorous work that decides whether your ad spend is being optimised against reality or against noise. Consent, conversions, ecommerce, cross-domain journeys and the offline sales nobody's feeding back.
What it is
“Tagging” is the collection of small pieces of code that tell each platform what happened on your site. Google Ads needs to know a sale occurred, and what it was worth. Meta needs the same. Your analytics needs to know which pages led there.
None of that is difficult individually. What makes it hard is that it has to be consistent across a dozen platforms, survive every site release, respect what each user consented to, and not count the same sale three times because three different tags claim credit for it.
When it's wrong, nothing obviously breaks. The dashboards still fill up. You just end up optimising campaigns against numbers that are quietly, systematically off — which is considerably worse than having no numbers at all.
The gap between real sales and tracked conversions is usually four or five things stacked on top of each other: users who declined advertising cookies, browser restrictions truncating attribution, ad blockers, conversions falling outside the platform's window, and offline sales that never make it back into the ad account.
Each one has a different fix and a different cost. The first job is always to measure how much each is accounting for, rather than reaching for whichever solution is fashionable.
How we help
Consent Mode implemented properly alongside your consent management platform, with the advertising and analytics signals wired to the right categories. Tested against real decline journeys — not just the happy path where everyone clicks accept.
Conversion actions configured to match how you actually count a sale, with sensible attribution and conversion windows, proper values, and deduplication between browser pixels and server-side events so nothing gets counted twice.
The full ecommerce event sequence — item views, add to cart, checkout steps, purchase — with consistent item data throughout, refunds handled, and revenue that reconciles with what your platform actually took.
Users who move between your main site, a booking engine and a payment provider, tracked as one journey instead of three separate sessions with the referral credited to your own checkout.
Capturing the click identifier at enquiry, storing it against the record in your CRM, and importing the value back when the deal closes — so campaigns optimise on revenue rather than on form fills.
Phone enquiries attributed to the campaign that drove them, and form submissions tracked reliably — including the awkward ones inside iframes, embedded booking widgets and third-party scheduling tools.
Worth knowing about
One of the more valuable fixes on an ad account, and one of the easiest to get wrong.
Enhanced conversions send a hashed version of first-party data you already hold — typically the email address a customer gave you at checkout — alongside the conversion. Google matches it against signed-in users and recovers conversions that cookies alone would have missed.
It only works if the hashing is done correctly, the right field is captured at the right moment, and the user's consent actually permits it. It is common to see implementations that send unhashed data, or send it for users who declined.
Questions
Consent Mode is how Google's tags are told whether a user consented to analytics and advertising storage. Version 2 added two further signals covering ad personalisation and ad user data. If you advertise to people in the UK or EEA and you want remarketing audiences and conversion modelling to keep working, you need it implemented correctly alongside a consent management platform — not just switched on.
Usually five things at once: consent declines, browser cookie restrictions, ad blockers, conversions falling outside the conversion window, and offline sales never fed back. Each needs a different fix, so the first job is measuring how much each one accounts for. Guessing here is how people spend money on server-side tagging when their actual problem was a conversion window set to 7 days.
They send a hashed version of first-party data you already hold — usually an email address given at checkout — alongside the conversion, so Google can match it against signed-in users and recover conversions cookies would have missed. Implemented properly it's often the highest-return change on an account. Implemented carelessly it's a data protection problem.
Yes. We capture the click identifier at the point of enquiry, store it against the record in your CRM, and set up an import so the value flows back to the ad platform when the deal closes. It usually needs a small amount of work from whoever owns your CRM, which we'll scope up front.
No, and anyone promising that is overselling. Platforms attribute differently by design, so some gap is permanent and correct. What we can do is make each platform accurate on its own terms, eliminate the gaps caused by genuine faults, and document which number to use for which decision.
We'll measure the gap between your real sales and your tracked conversions, and tell you what's causing it.