Tracking

Your ads dashboard claims last week’s webinar generated fifteen opportunities, your CRM says seven, and finance will not sign off either number. That mismatch is not a rounding error; it is the red warning light that the pipes behind your metrics are leaking.

I have sat in that meeting for fifteen years, from scrappy SaaS start-ups to post-exit scale-ups. Every time the cause was the same: data sources drifted apart because nobody maintained the plumbing. In one firm a single letter in a UTM tag wiped three weeks of pipeline from automation. At a later unicorn a paid channel looked heroic in the media plan but silent in the ledger, again because events were mis-assigned. Once the numbers disagree, every conversation about budget, growth, or valuation stalls.

So I drew a line. If Analytics, Tag Manager and every downstream dashboard do not match, something is broken and it gets fixed before lunch. I only measure moments that move money: demos booked, trials started, deals signed. Scroll-depth and hover experiments live in a sandbox until revenue events work. One focused afternoon wiring those events today avoids the €100K reconstruction bill companies face when data chaos finally blocks fundraising.

This guide hands you the checklist I give every new growth hire on day one. Use it and you will know, not guess. You will leave with a clean, single source of tracking that shows exactly where revenue comes from and flags leaks before they burn budget—so you can scale with confidence, not crossed fingers.

The chapters below walk you through each step. Tighten the pipes today and tomorrow your dashboards will finally match your bank statement.

Most marketing teams inherit a measurement stack rather than build one. Tools arrive with new hires, agencies, or campaigns and are rarely reviewed together. Over time their labels drift, their scripts overlap, and their numbers contradict. The remedy is not buying yet another platform; it is enforcing the discipline of a single narrative. Start by writing down the business questions that actually guide decisions—usually centred on pipeline, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value. Every metric that cannot answer those questions belongs in a playground, not on the board deck.

Next, map the customer journey from first touch to closed deal and mark the moments where cash likelihood changes. Those decision points become your instrumentation list. Build naming conventions that spell out action, object, and stage in plain language so newcomers understand the event without a handbook. Document the map inline, not after the fact; when rules live beside code they stay current.

With conventions locked, assign ownership. Someone must be on call for measurement hygiene just as someone watches servers. Weekly checks on event volume, parameter format, and unexplained gaps catch issues before leadership meetings do. Add alerts that fire if a revenue event drops below expected thresholds for more than a day. This tiny ritual turns ad-hoc debugging into routine maintenance.

Finally, embed data confidence into culture. Share a five-minute victory demo when clean numbers unblock a project, and log every fix in a public changelog. Visible wins create momentum and remind the team why rigour matters. Over a quarter the habit compounds: fewer debates, faster launches, and sharper experiments. Reliable measurement is not glamorous, but it is the cheapest growth lever you will ever pull.