How to audit your offline conversion tracking in 30 minutes (a checklist with what each check means)

Most offline conversion setups break quietly. Nothing errors. The numbers just drift. So here's a check you can run once a quarter that catches most of it, with the reasoning behind each step so you can adapt it.

Set a timer for 30 minutes.

1. Trace 20 won deals (5 minutes). Take your last 20 won deals. How many appear as conversions in the ad platform? Count the gap. That's your headline number, and everything else explains it. If the gap is small, you may be done. If it's large, the next checks tell you where it went.

2. Check the click ID (4 minutes). Open a few of those leads and check the click ID is stored. If it's blank, nothing could ever match. This is the single most common cause of a big gap.

3. Check the timestamp (3 minutes). The sale has to be after the click, and in the time zone the platform expects. A sale dated before its own click is thrown away.

4. Look at match quality (4 minutes). Event Match Quality in Meta, the upload report in Google Ads. Low quality means the data you send can't find the person.

5. Compare against real orders (4 minutes). Take one week. Ad platform conversions far higher than real orders means double counting. Far lower means dropped events. Check value as well as count.

6. Check the windows (3 minutes). Are you sending to Meta within 7 days of the event, and to Google and LinkedIn within 90 days of the click?

7. Look at what was sent (4 minutes). Read a sample of the leads that reached the platform. Are fakes in there? If a fifth of them are junk, the ads are learning from junk.

8. Confirm someone gets told when a send fails (3 minutes). A failed send you never see is the most expensive kind. If nothing tells you, that's the finding.

Scoring, roughly. No problems found means you're in good shape. A few means you're losing sales in the data. A lot means the ads are learning from a broken picture, which is fixable, and worth knowing.

The reason step 8 matters most: every other check finds a problem that already happened. Step 8 is the one that finds the next one, and it's the one that turns an audit from a quarterly chore into something that runs itself.

If you want to make this less of a chore, automate the parts that don't need judgment. A weekly comparison of yesterday's won deals against the conversions the platform received takes minutes to set up in a spreadsheet, and gives you step 1 every week instead of every quarter. A simple alert for "no conversions sent in 24 hours" catches a broken pipe within a day.

Keep the parts that need judgment (are the leads real? is the stage honest?) for the quarterly session. And keep a one-page record of what you found, because next quarter's audit is much faster when you can compare against this one.

Post your worst number below and I'll help you work out where it went missing.