What a tracking audit actually checks

Tracking audits have a reputation problem. Plenty of them are a tour of the analytics interface with observations attached. A useful one starts somewhere else entirely: with your own records.

Start from the money

Take a period that is closed and settled. Pull the orders, or the closed deals, from the system that finance trusts. That is the denominator. Everything else in the audit is an attempt to explain the distance between that figure and what the marketing tools report.

Then work backwards

With the real figure fixed, the questions become concrete rather than theoretical.

• Does the platform-reported conversion count exceed the real one, and by how much
• Are events firing on the pages and interactions you think they are, tested live in a browser
• Does consent behaviour match what the consent tool claims, server-side as well as in the browser
• Can a single person be followed across domains, subdomains and devices, or does the journey break
• Are there duplicate events, from a tag added twice during a site change nobody rolled back

The output is a decision list

An audit that ends in observations has not finished. The deliverable is a prioritised list: what is broken, what each break is costing in misallocated budget, and what to fix first. Some findings will not be worth fixing, and saying so is part of the job.

How long it should take

One to two weeks for most mid-market businesses. Longer than that usually means the audit has turned into the remediation, which is a separate piece of work and should be quoted separately.