When conversion tracking is worth the effort

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Conversion tracking is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

When it is worth it

If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

How to decide

Test that the tracking fires before relying on it. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

In practice

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Three things worth confirming about conversion tracking before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Test that the tracking fires before relying on it — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.