Why the Dashboard Number Is the First Thing We Audit
Between 60 and 75 percent of buy-side measurement users say current measurement approaches fall short on rigor, timeliness, trust and efficiency (IAB State of Data with BWG Global, 2026). Behind that statistic sits the question every marketing leader has typed into a dashboard late at night: is this number real? Usually nobody in the building can answer it, because tracking fails silently. The banner shows, the form submits, the dashboard fills, and one broken link in the chain has been quietly discarding or miscounting data for months.
In every account we have opened, at least one of the 15 checks below was failing. Not most accounts, every account. The two failures we find most often are quiet ones: a consent banner that stores the visitor's choice but never sends the consent update, so every hit ships as denied; and form fields mapped by label instead of an explicit name attribute, which silently drops data, on localized forms most of all. Both produce dashboards that look plausible and are wrong.
This teardown is a conversion tracking audit you run yourself: it checks the full path a lead travels between click and closed deal. It goes one layer deeper than our B2B PPC Self-Audit Scorecard, which covers the whole account across 60 checks; here the single subject is whether your numbers can be trusted at all.
The 15 Checks, Grouped by Layer
Answer each check honestly: yes if it verifiably passes today, partial if it passes somewhere but not everywhere or you are not sure, no if it fails or nobody has looked. Weights are printed on each check and sum to 100, matching the rubric in the PDF checklist; the heaviest weights sit on the layers that silently invalidate everything downstream when they fail. All scoring runs in your browser. Nothing you enter is transmitted or stored.
Layer 1 · Consent Mode 0 / 20 pts
Layer 2 · Conversion Actions 0 / 20 pts
Layer 3 · CRM and Ad-Platform Sync 0 / 14 pts
Layer 4 · Forms 0 / 12 pts
Layer 5 · GA4 Key Events 0 / 20 pts
Layer 6 · Offline Import 0 / 14 pts
Answer all 15 checks to get your band and your next step.
What the Bands Mean
| Score | Band | What it means for your decisions |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 49 | Rebuild first | The errors compound: unconsented hits are discarded, conversion actions count the wrong things, and the CRM cannot confirm any of it. Pause every performance judgment, channel, budget, agency, until the failing checks are fixed, then re-score. |
| 50 to 69 | Directional only | The trend line is probably real; the absolute numbers are not. The typical profile here passes consent and conversion actions but fails CRM sync and offline import, so bidding optimizes toward raw lead volume instead of revenue. |
| 70 to 100 | Decision-grade | Your reported numbers can carry budget decisions. The productive next step is modeling what they say: our B2B Marketing Budget Calculator works backwards from your pipeline target. Watch checks 13 and 15 monthly, they are the two that quietly decay. |
The thresholds are deliberate. Below 50, fixing tracking outranks every optimization on your list. Between 50 and 69, you can keep operating while you repair the failing layers, but hold off on structural decisions such as reallocating budget between channels or changing agencies. From 70, the marginal hour goes further in strategy than in plumbing, which is the standing philosophy on our Google Ads management engagements: tracking is week-one work, always, because everything after it depends on the numbers being real.
How We Built the Checklist, and What We Did Not Use
The 15 checks come from the audits we run at the start of every engagement, generalized and stripped of anything client-specific. No client data appears on this page or in the PDF: every pass criterion points to platform documentation you can verify yourself, Google’s Consent Mode v2 developer docs, the GA4 key-events documentation, Google Ads conversion diagnostics, and LinkedIn’s Conversions API docs. The one pattern we do carry over from experience is the ranking: the weights reflect which failures we have seen do the most silent damage, with consent mode first because a missing consent update makes every downstream number wrong at once.
Read-Only Verification, Answered
What does the 48-hour read-only verification include?
We run all 15 checks against your live setup with viewer-level access and deliver a written finding per check within 48 hours: pass or fail, the evidence we saw, and the fixes in priority order. It is a diagnosis, not a sales deck, and the document is yours either way.
What access do you need to verify the checks?
Read-only everywhere: Google Ads read-only access, the GA4 Viewer role, read access to your tag container, and a report view in your CRM. No admin rights, no billing access, no publish permissions. You can revoke all of it the moment the findings are delivered.
What do you never touch during a verification?
Nothing changes: no campaign edits, no tag publishes, no conversion action changes, no settings of any kind. If we find something urgent, we document it and hand it to your team. Remediation only ever happens as a separately agreed scope with your written approval, verification and repair are two distinct steps.
How is the Tracking Integrity Score calculated?
Each of the 15 checks carries a printed weight, and the weights sum to 100. Yes earns the full weight, partial earns half, no earns zero. Consent mode, conversion actions and GA4 key events together carry 60 of the 100 points because when those layers fail, every number downstream is wrong. The scoring is deliberately mechanical, so two people auditing the same account land on the same number.
Is my score or my answers stored anywhere?
No. The diagnostic runs entirely in your browser: answers, scores and inputs are never transmitted or stored. The only information we receive is your email address if you choose to request the PDF checklist, and it is used for the download, plus the newsletter only if you tick the box.
We Verify All 15 Checks in 48 Hours, Read-Only
Viewer access to Google Ads, GA4 and your tag container is all we need. You get a written finding per check, the failures ranked by revenue impact, and the fix list, before any conversation about management. No edits, no publishes, nothing touched.
Request the 48-Hour Verification