The short answer
Test it yourself. Click your own ad, submit the form, and check that the conversion appears where it should. A surprising share of accounts we look at are optimising against a conversion event that fires on the wrong page or not at all.
Then reconcile weekly against your own record of enquiries received. The platform is not the source of truth about your business.
Where tracking breaks
- The conversion fires on page load rather than on successful submission
- Consent tooling blocks the tag and nobody noticed
- A form change moved the confirmation and the trigger no longer matches
- The tag is on the staging site and not production, or both
- Enquiries by phone or email are invisible entirely
- Ad blockers remove the tag for a share of visitors
The first is the most damaging, because it inflates conversions and the platform optimises towards traffic that never converts. It also looks like success until someone counts actual enquiries.
Verify properly
- Click your own ad from a device and network you do not normally use.
- Complete the form as a customer would.
- Confirm the enquiry arrived in your inbox or system.
- Confirm the conversion appears in the ad platform.
- Repeat after any change to the form or the site.
Step five is what catches the slow failures. Forms get changed, and the tracking that depended on the old confirmation page stops working silently.
Why platform numbers never match
| Platform says | Your records say | Usual reason |
|---|---|---|
| More conversions | Fewer enquiries | Wrong trigger, or duplicates |
| Fewer conversions | More enquiries | Blocked tags, or phone enquiries |
| Different totals across platforms | One number | Each claims the same conversion |
The bottom row is inherent. Platforms attribute by their own rules and both will claim a conversion they each touched. Reconciling to one internal number is the only way to compare them.
Count enquiries yourself
Your own record of enquiries, with the source captured at the point of submission, is the number to manage the business on. Platform conversions are useful for optimising campaigns and are not a business metric.
Storing the source with each enquiry is a small piece of work and it makes every subsequent question about advertising answerable.