How can I tell if my Google Analytics tracking is broken?

Open GA4 Realtime, perform a conversion on your own site (submit the form, click the phone number) and watch for the event within a minute. If it does not appear, or appears twice, tracking is broken for that event. Also check for sudden drops to zero in daily reports, and use Google Tag Assistant in Preview to see whether the tag fires.

Why did my conversions suddenly drop to zero?

The usual causes are a theme or plugin update that changed a button or form, a checkout or booking tool change that moved the confirmation page, a GTM version published by someone else that removed your tags, a consent banner update that now blocks tags by default, or an expired or changed tracking ID.

How do I check if the Meta Pixel is working?

Use the Meta Pixel Helper browser extension on your site, then open Events Manager, Test Events, and perform the action. Each event should appear once with the expected name. Events Manager's overview also shows the last time each event was received.

How do I check if Google Ads conversion tracking is working?

In Google Ads, open Goals, Conversions. Each conversion action shows a status such as Recording conversions, No recent conversions or Inactive. Test the action on your site with Tag Assistant to confirm the conversion tag fires with the right ID and label.

Is there a way to get alerted when tracking breaks?

Yes. GA4 has basic custom insights for anomalies, and monitoring tools such as TC Pro watch each event per site and alert you when one that normally fires goes quiet, spikes, or stops arriving from a domain. That turns a month of bad data into a same-day fix.

How Do You Know If Your Website Tracking Is Broken?

Broken tracking rarely announces itself. GA4 keeps showing page views, Google Ads keeps spending, and the only clue is a number that quietly makes less sense than it did last month. Here are the seven signs to look for, a ten-minute check you can run right now, the causes we see most, and how to be alerted next time instead of finding out at month end.

Seven signs your tracking is broken

A conversion drops to zero overnight while traffic stays flat. Real behaviour changes gradually; tracking breaks on a deploy.
Conversions double. Two purchase events per order, or a form submission that fires on page load, usually after a plugin update or a duplicated tag.
Google Ads says "No recent conversions" or "Inactive" on a conversion action that used to record.
Meta Events Manager shows no activity for an event that fired last week.
GA4 Realtime shows nothing when you test it yourself. The most reliable sign, and the one nobody checks.
Your ad platform's automated bidding gets worse without a change in budget or creative. It is optimising towards fewer or wrong signals.
Revenue in GA4 disagrees wildly with your shop's own reports. Small gaps are normal; a 40 percent gap means purchase tracking is missing orders or counting some twice.

The ten-minute check

Test each conversion yourself. Open GA4 Realtime in one tab and your site in another. Submit the form, click the phone number, add to cart, place a test order. Each event should appear within a minute, once.
Open GTM Preview and repeat. Tag Assistant shows which tags fired on each action, and which did not. A trigger that no longer matches shows as "not fired".
Check Meta. Events Manager, Test Events, perform the action, confirm the event and its name.
Check Google Ads. Goals, Conversions, look at the status column and the last conversion date for each action.
Check consent. Decline cookies on your banner and repeat the GA4 test. With Consent Mode v2, GA4 should still receive modelled pings; without it, a banner update can silently block everything.

The usual causes

Cause	What it looks like	Fix
Theme or plugin update changed a class name	Button or form event stops; page views fine	Update the trigger selector; a scan-based regeneration does this in one go
Checkout or booking tool changed its confirmation page	Purchase or booking event stops	Point the trigger at the new page or data layer event
Someone published a GTM version that removed your tags	Several events stop at once	Restore the earlier version from GTM version history
Consent banner update blocks tags by default	Big drop in all events, mostly EU and UK traffic	Fix the consent integration; enable Consent Mode v2
Duplicate tags after an import with Overwrite or Merge without renaming	Conversions double	Remove the duplicate; always Merge and rename
Tracking ID changed or property was recreated	Everything stops	Update the ID in the GTM variable
Attribution missing rather than broken	Conversions arrive but with no source	See tracking the traffic source of an event

How to find out on the day, not at month end

Manual checks work if you do them. Most people do them once, after a scare, and then stop. The reliable answer is monitoring that watches each event per site and compares it with what normally happens:

No-activity alerts: the purchase event on a shop that usually fires hourly has not fired for a day.
Drift alerts: form submissions are down 60 percent versus the trailing average while traffic is flat.
Spike alerts: an event suddenly fires ten times more, which usually means a duplicate.
Probe checks: a scheduled test that loads the site and confirms the container and key tags are still present.

GA4's custom insights can cover the first two for a single property with some setup. For agencies and anyone managing more than one site, a dedicated monitoring layer is easier because it shows every domain in one place.

Where TrackingCoder fits

TC Pro, the monitoring layer of TrackingCoder, watches every event on every domain you manage and shows live counts, goals and traffic sources per site. It sends no-activity, drift, spike and probe-failure alerts by email and in the dashboard, so a broken purchase event is a same-day fix rather than a month of bad bidding data. When something has changed on the site, regenerating the affected event from a fresh scan is included. If you have not set up tracking yet, start here; if you want to see what a site is currently running, use the free tracking detector.