Engineering · for whoever runs your tracking

What Meta and Google do that quietly breaks your numbers, and the fix for each.

This is the engineering section. It is not written for an owner. Each note is one thing Meta or Google does that quietly makes an ad account's numbers wrong, what it looks like, and the fix. Send the link to whoever runs your tracking. If you want the numbers in your own words, start at the calculators.

Conversion tracking for home servicesWhat to send Meta and Google, what never to send, and how to set it up in five steps. 8 min read. Why a moved appointment counts as two bookingsA moved appointment can count twice. The ads then learn that a no-show who rebooked is worth double. What a retry can carry, and what it cannotA retry has no browser. Part of what Meta matches on goes with it, and the retry has to stop at 48 hours. The cancelled booking you must never sendSome bookings must never go out. Send a cancelled one and the ads learn to buy people who cancel. The opt-out that only stopped half of the trackingThe browser stops tracking. The server keeps sending the homeowner's details to Meta on every booking. One dataset for every client, and why that is wrongOne dataset for every client and one company's ads learn from another company's customers. A value sent in the wrong currencyA value in the wrong currency makes one visit look worth more than a decade of ad spend. The click id in the wrong fieldGoogle has three kinds of click id. File one in the wrong field and Google accepts the upload while refusing the row. The failure that looks like successGoogle can answer OK and still refuse your row. Read only the status and you record conversions that never landed. The conversion filed on the wrong dayGoogle files a conversion on the date you tell it. A retry that sends the current time moves your bookings onto the day of the outage.