What should you track before running ads? The one conversion that matters to the business (a booked call, a purchase, a sign-up), where every visitor came from, and enough detail to tell good leads from bad ones. If you can’t measure those, the ad platforms can’t learn and neither can you.
The five things we set up first
- 01One primary conversion, tracked as a real event: the booked call or the purchase, not a button click.
- 02Source on every lead: which campaign, ad and search brought them, kept all the way into your CRM.
- 03Conversions sent back to Meta and Google, server-side where possible, so the platforms optimise for buyers.
- 04A thank-you or confirmation step that fires once per conversion, so nothing is counted twice.
- 05One simple dashboard everyone agrees on, so nobody argues about whose numbers are right.
Why it matters so much
Ad platforms learn from the conversions you send them. Send them clicks and they find people who click. Send them booked calls and purchases and they find people who buy. Most accounts we audit are optimising for the wrong thing because the tracking was set up in a hurry.
“Fix the tracking first. Every decision after it depends on those numbers.”
Setting this up usually takes one to two weeks. It’s the first part of our tracking and conversion work, and it comes before any paid ads campaign we run.
Growth lead at Rvysion. Runs paid ads, tracking and conversion work for startups and growing brands.