This guide will show you how to troubleshoot tracking issues.

As long as these principles below are met, we should be tracking properly.

(Note: We see #1, 2, and 3 as the most common reasons for gaps in attribution and tracking.)

Follow these 5 Tracking Principles:

Your Landing Page lives on the Top-Level Domain connected to your dashboard
Your Landing Page has the Northbeam Pixel placed and firing correctly
Your Channels are connected and using the correct UTM Parameters
Your Checkout Page has the Purchase Pixel
Your A-Record is properly set up

1. Your Landing Page lives on the Top-Level Domain connected to your dashboard

This is normally the domain of your store. Please make sure your sending as much traffic as possible to your domain.

To find the specific domain connected to your dashboard:

Navigate to Settings
Under Account Settings, click onProfile
At the bottom, see Domain Name

BUT, Publisher Ads are an exception.

Let's say you launch a campaign called "Blog". Your dashboard domain is mystore.com but you're sending traffic to myblog.com, which eventually links to mystore.com None of the conversions (or visits) will be attributed to "Blog". Instead, they'll be seen as referral traffic - specifically "referral: mystore.com" within the Sales page. This is normally a problem since you won't be able to see the efficacy of "Blog".

The easy answer is to change the landing page to mystore.com, but that's not always possible.

The workaround here is to use Redirect Links.

If this applies to you and you'd like to learn more about Redirect Links, please submit an inquiry here.

2. Your Landing Page has the Northbeam Pixel placed and is firing correctly

The Northbeam Pixel is a required snippet of code that allows us to collect behavioral information about your website visitors – including their marketing touchpoints and pages they’ve visited.

This information feeds into our backend device graph, allowing us to track customer journeys from site visit to purchase, along with marketing touchpoints in between.

With all this said, it’s very important for the Northbeam pixel to be firing on all pages of your website.

How to test the Northbeam Pixel on any page:

3. Your Channels are connected and using the correct UTM Parameters

Be sure that all your ad accounts are connected without any connection errors.

To see your ad accounts:

Navigate to Settings
Click on Connections

Next, UTM Parameters. We use UTM parameters to associate the conversion back to the ad campaign or channel. Therefore, they're extremely important for proper attribution. The Pixels could be firing, but without UTMs, we won't able to identify what exactly drove the conversion.

If the platform is in our UTM Guide, please use those listed parameters.

Navigate to Settings
Under Onboarding Tasks, click on UTM Guide

If the platform is not in our UTM Guide, please use standard UTM Parameters (Learn more here).

How to check for your UTM Parameters on Google, Facebook, and TikTok

Also, please check for Redirect URLs, which result in UTM stripping

In some rare cases, UTMs get stripped off your URLs as a result of redirect URLs. As a result, the UTMs don't get picked up by our Pixel, causing a gap in tracking.

Here's how to test for stripping:

Step 1: Grab the entire URL with UTMs of the affected ad(s)

Step 2: Copy + paste it into your browser and hit "Enter"

Step 3: Look at the URL and see if the necessary parameters are still there

We often see redirects in page paths:

If the Redirect URL has UTMs, they're normally stripped from the Final URL. Let's use the example from above.

Two Solutions

Make sure none of your URLs are redirecting
Make sure the UTMs get transferred over from the Redirect URL to the Final URL.

4. Your Checkout Page has the Purchase Pixel

This is normally completed the during the Onboarding Process, so it's rare for it to fall off -- unless there was a change to your checkout process.

Keep in mind, if your Purchase Pixel fell off, all of your revenue would be Unattributed and there wouldn't be any attribution from any campaigns or channels. That said, if this doesn't apply to you, this is likely not happening

Purchase Pixel for Shopify

The Purchase Pixel for Shopify is called the "Order Status Page" script. Please make sure the script is placed in your Shopify Settings.

To find the script with installation instructions:

Navigate to Settings
Click on Tracking Script Tags
Reference "Shopify: order status page"

Purchase Pixel for WooCommerce and Magento

The Purchase Pixel for Custom Setups is called the "firePurchaseEvent" script. However, this script is normally auto-injected during the onboarding process through our WooCommerce or Magento plugin.

Please check your plugins in WooCommerce and Magento and ensure that it's still installed.

Purchase Pixel for Custom Setups

The Purchase Pixel for Custom Setups is called the "firePurchaseEvent" script. This is normally placed at the tail end of your customer journey (ex. "Thank You Page" or "Order Confirmation Page") and can be deployed through Google Tag Manager or hardcoded on your site.

Please check ensure its configuration (ex. trigger, correct variables).

5. Your A-Record is properly set up

This is normally completed the during the Onboarding Process, so it's rare for it to fall off -- unless there was a change to your internal DNS Settings.

Keep in mind, if your A-Record fell off, all of your revenue would be Unattributed and there wouldn't be any attribution from any campaigns or channels. That said, if this doesn't apply to you, this is likely not happening

Checking Your A-Record

To find instructions on configuring your A-Record:

Navigate to Settings
Click on Setup DNS Entry
Ensure your A-Record in your internal DNS provider is has the correct host name (ex. "i") while pointing to the correct address.

Here are common symptoms/findings and how to address. Find the most common in bold.

Symptoms / Findings	Affected Metric(s)	How we track	How to check
"My ad spend is incorrect"	Ad Spend	API Connection / Custom Spend Sheet	API Connection: Settings > Connections Custom Spend: Settings > Data Spreadsheets
"Certain campaigns/ads have very poor performance and abnormally high CPCs"	Visits, Transactions, Revenue	UTMs and Base Pixel	Verify all ads have UTMs (see UTM Guide) and test website + landing page(s) for Northbeam Pixel
"ALL my ads have normal CPCs, but extremely low revenue"	Transactions + Revenue	Purchase Pixel	Check website backend for the Purchase Pixel script
"ALL of my revenue and visits are attributed to Organic."	Visits, Transactions, Revenue	A-Record	Check DNS Provider for A-Record