Your pixel is lying to you.
Most e-commerce accounts we audit have a tracking problem, and almost none of them know it. The dashboard shows numbers, the numbers look plausible, and so nobody checks them against the one source that doesn’t lie: the orders in your store.
Three ways a pixel lies
- It misses sales. Browsers block scripts, people pay through a redirect, the thank-you page never loads. The platform sees fewer purchases than you made, decides your ads don’t work, and stops showing them to the people who buy.
- It counts sales twice. A refresh of the thank-you page, a pixel installed by the theme and again by an app, browser and server events without deduplication. Results look great; profit doesn’t.
- It reports the wrong value. Missing currency, tax included one day and excluded the next, a fixed value of 1 on every order. The platform can’t tell a €12 order from a €1,200 one, so it can’t find more of the big ones.
How to check in an afternoon
- Place three test orders with different values. Compare what Meta, Google and GA4 report against your store.
- Look at Meta’s Events Manager for duplicate purchase events and the event match quality score.
- Check what happens when a visitor rejects cookies. Does anything still get measured, in a way that respects their choice?
What to fix first
Start with purchases. Make sure every order is sent once, with the right value and currency, from both the browser and the server (Conversions API on Meta, Events API on TikTok, enhanced conversions on Google). Then fix the steps before it: add to cart, checkout started. Only then is it worth scaling spend.
Scaling broken tracking only scales the mistake.