Notes from AdStake
We Found Our Own Broken Tracking
AdStake exists to catch conversion tracking problems in other people's ad accounts. This month we found one in our own — quietly broken for weeks, invisible until we went looking. Here's exactly what happened.
A few weeks into running our first Google Ads campaigns, the number we cared about most — conversions — sat at zero. Real traffic, real clicks, real spend. Zero recorded sales.
The easy conclusion would have been “the product isn't landing.” We didn't take that conclusion at face value — that's the whole discipline AdStake is built on: verify before you trust a number, especially the one that looks the most alarming.
What we actually found
Working backward from the zero, we found three separate, real problems stacked on top of each other:
- Our own checkout page was defaulting to a higher price tier than what our homepage advertised — a mismatch that would erode trust right before the highest-friction step.
- Google Ads' Purchase conversion action was flagged “Misconfigured” — not because our tracking code was wrong, but because it had never received a single verified conversion to confirm against.
- And, found while fixing the above: our transactional email provider's API key had silently gone invalid. Every automated email the site tried to send — signup confirmations, audit-ready notifications, admin alerts — had been failing without triggering any alarm.
How we confirmed it, instead of guessing
We didn't patch these blind. We ran a real transaction — an actual $149 purchase, paid with a real card, then refunded — specifically to generate one real, verifiable data point at every stage of the pipeline: checkout, payment, webhook, audit generation, email delivery, ad-platform conversion recording. That single real transaction surfaced the broken email key immediately, because the notification email that should have arrived never did.
Once we traced the failure to an invalid API key, we replaced it, then verified the fix the same way — not by assuming it worked, but by sending another real email and confirming a delivery event landed in our own logs.
Why we're telling you this
None of this is unusual. It's exactly the kind of quiet, compounding failure that accumulates in any account nobody has independently reviewed in a while — a tracking tag that was never verified, an integration that broke silently, a default that drifted out of sync with what the marketing actually promises. It's the same pattern we look for in every account we audit. We just happened to find it in our own.
If it can hide in the account of a company whose entire business is catching this stuff, it can hide in yours.