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Poor tracking hides half your buyers
Ecommerce versus SaaS
Ecommerce has Triple Whale and Elevar: plug in ad spend, add a pixel, and the tool shows what drives new revenue, with conversion tracking working out of the box in about 15 minutes. SaaS has no equivalent. Every startup builds its own analytics from scratch, with a database, a BI layer such as ClickHouse and Hex, and its own choice between first-click and last-click attribution.
Match scores
Meta scores how well a company's events match real people with a match rate, and Google has an enrichment score. Anything short of maxing those out means the platforms miss around half the people who convert. They are ghost people: Meta doesn't see them and never attributes the conversion.
Why costs climb
Each platform's algorithm does what it is told. When subscriptions are tracked well, Meta learns what a subscriber looks like from the volume of events and delivers more of them. With poor tracking, Meta can't tell who those people are, so it targets at random and CAC climbs. That is how a company ends up concluding that paid doesn't work for it. About 90% of companies skip the setup before spending their first cent.
How does Meta score event matching?
Meta reports a metric called Event Match Quality in its Events Manager. It rates, on a scale up to 10, how well the customer details sent with each event, such as a hashed email address or phone number, can be matched to a Meta account. Google has a similar mechanism called Enhanced Conversions, which sends hashed first-party data alongside conversions. Both exist because a click alone does not tell the platform which account later converted.
Why can browsers lose track of conversions?
Browsers have been limiting cross-site tracking for years. Apple's Safari capped the lifetime of some cookies set by scripts at seven days starting in 2019 with Intelligent Tracking Prevention. Apple's App Tracking Transparency, released with iOS 14.5 in 2021, made apps ask permission before tracking people across other companies' apps. Meta's Conversions API sends events from a company's own server, which takes the browser out of the path.
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