Conversion & attribution
What is Conversion tracking?
Recording the actions that matter to the business (purchase, lead, signup) and attributing them back to the marketing that drove them.
Definition
Conversion tracking is the discipline of recording the outcomes a client actually cares about — a purchase, a qualified lead, a booked call — and tying each one back to the campaign, keyword, or channel that caused it.
It spans four layers: the browser (pixel/tag), the network (the ad platform’s conversion action), the server (Conversions API / Measurement Protocol), and reconciliation (do the numbers agree?). A break in any layer corrupts the whole picture.
Why it matters for agencies
Conversion tracking is the number every optimization and every client report depends on. Conversion dashboards count firings, not contents, so a setup can look healthy while passing the wrong value — and ROAS quietly drifts from reality.
For an agency, broken conversion tracking is an existential risk: you optimize toward a bad signal, the client’s results suffer, and the post-mortem reveals the tracking was wrong the whole time. Verification-first beats trust-the-dashboard.
Conversion tracking in Phloz
Phloz models conversion actions (Google Ads conversion actions, Meta/TikTok events) as typed nodes and runs audit rules for the classic failures — a Google Ads account with no conversion action, a half-mapped conversion, a pixel with no server backup — so breakage is caught at onboarding, not at the QBR.
Frequently asked questions
- Why don’t my GA4 and Google Ads conversion numbers match?
- They count different things with different attribution windows and models — GA4 uses data-driven attribution over its lookback, Google Ads counts conversions by click time. A gap is expected; a large or growing gap is a signal something’s misconfigured.
- How often should conversion tracking be verified?
- At onboarding, after any site or container change, and on a recurring cadence (quarterly at minimum). The point is to catch silent breakage — a fired-but-empty event — before it accumulates weeks of bad data.
Related terms
Other tracking-infrastructure concepts agencies run into alongside this one.
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