Case study: a campaign that looked profitable because of a tracking bug

A prospective client came to us believing their paid social campaigns were their best-performing channel by a wide margin, based on in-platform reported return on ad spend, and were preparing to shift significant budget away from paid search to fund further social spend.

During discovery, we found that a legacy pixel implementation was firing a conversion event on both the checkout confirmation page and a subsequent thank-you email open, effectively counting a meaningful share of purchases twice within the social platform's own reporting. Paid search, using a cleaner server-side conversion setup, was reporting accurately.

Once conversions were reconciled against actual order data, paid search's true return on spend was materially stronger than the platform-reported social numbers had suggested, and the planned budget shift would have moved money away from the better-performing channel based on a measurement error rather than a real performance difference.

The client held the original budget split for one more cycle while we corrected the tracking, then reallocated based on the corrected numbers. The broader lesson: a discrepancy that flatters a channel deserves the same scrutiny as one that makes a channel look bad — it's just less likely to get questioned.