What Is Ad Tracking?
Ad tracking is the collection and organization of interactions associated with advertising activity: clicks, visits, leads, purchases, calls and other conversion events.
Tracking vs attribution
Tracking tells you what events were observed. Attribution decides how credit should be assigned across them. A tracking problem can therefore exist even when the attribution model is fine—and vice versa.
Browser-side tracking
Browser scripts can record page views and events but are affected by browser policies, blockers, consent choices and implementation errors.
Server-side tracking
Server-controlled event collection can improve reliability and governance for selected events. It still requires lawful collection, consent where required and careful deduplication. See server-side tracking.
First-party data
First-party identifiers can help connect events in a direct customer relationship. They should be collected transparently and used within applicable privacy and platform rules.
What to audit first
- Conversion definitions.
- Event firing and duplicate events.
- UTM/campaign naming consistency.
- CRM and backend revenue reconciliation.
- Attribution windows and models.