Fix your tracking before you scale your ad budget

Every scaling decision rests on numbers: which channel brings customers, which campaign pays back, which experiment won. If those numbers are wrong, every decision built on them is a guess, however confident the dashboard looks.

In mobile apps especially, broken attribution and missing postbacks are common. Ad platforms then optimise towards the wrong users, and teams cut the channels that were actually working.

Start with an event map, not a tool

Before installing anything, list the moments that matter in your funnel: first visit, sign-up, first key action, purchase, repeat purchase, referral. For each one, write its exact name, when it fires and which properties it carries, such as value, currency and channel.

This map becomes the contract between marketing, product and engineering. Without it, the same event ends up named three different ways in three tools.

Then implement and QA end to end

Implement events in your analytics, your attribution tool and your CRM from the same map. Then test each one on a real device or browser: does it fire once, with the right properties, and does it reach every destination?

Finally, reconcile. Purchases in analytics should roughly match orders in your backend. A large gap means the data is not ready to drive spend yet.

The payoff

Clean tracking does not grow a business by itself, but it makes everything else work: budgets move to channels that truly pay back, experiments have a clear winner, and cohort analysis shows where customers drop off. It is the first thing we set up on every engagement.