Digital ad tracking was way harder than I thought it would be

I spent a month setting up Google Ads for my ecommerce store, thinking it would take a weekend tops. But I kept running into issues with conversion tracking not matching up with my actual sales data. Turned out I had the Google tag installed twice and missed a step in the event setup. It took me about 3 weeks of digging through forums to finally get it right. Has anyone else had tracking take way longer to sort out than you planned?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_kelly19d ago

Went through this exact nightmare last month. Spent 4 full days just trying to figure out why my Shopify sales were showing as purchases in the backend but not in Google Ads. Turned out I was using both the Shopify Google channel app AND the manual Google tag at the same time. The double firing messed everything up. My advice - pick one method and stick with it. Don't mix and match like I did. Also check your data attribution window in Google Ads settings. That one slipped past me for two weeks.

nathan_bailey18d ago

Wait, were you using the Shopify Google channel app alongside manual tags? I ran into almost the same issue last year and it drove me nuts trying to untangle which one was actually sending data. Did you end up going fully with the app or did you switch to just doing it manually through Google Tag Manager? I'm curious cause I tried both ways and felt like the app missed some stuff but the manual way took way more time to set up right.