Too many marketing teams spend more time fixing tracking than interpreting results.
Weeks go into debugging tags, updating dashboards, and reconciling numbers between analytics and ad platforms — while insights and actions take a back seat.
Modern analytics setups have become overcomplicated.
Integrations, data warehouses, and server-side tag management may sound impressive, but they often produce unreliable or underutilised data. Instead of building more layers of complexity, most marketing teams would achieve more by focusing on the basics and making them work reliably.
What do marketers really need?
For most SMBs and B2B enterprise marketers, the goal isn’t to track everything — it’s to have trustworthy data that supports daily decisions.
Here’s what to prioritise.
1. Conversion data
Keep it simple. If you get just one or two conversions per form or month, you don’t need to report them separately. Focus on meaningful goals (leads, demo requests, and purchases) and ensure they are clearly defined and measured accurately.
2. Campaign data
Campaign data is only as good as the tagging behind it. And for that, you need 100% support from your advertising teams. Without their commitment to proper campaign parameters, marketers will never have clean, comparable data.
3. A few meaningful microconversions
Microconversions help you see early engagement — for example, guide downloads, calculator use, or viewing the pricing page. Select a few that actually convey something about user intent and exclude the rest.
4. Consent rate
Your analytics is only as reliable as your consent rate. If only half of your visitors give their consent, you need to know it and act accordingly. Tracking consent rate helps you interpret results correctly and improve transparency for users.
5. Automated quality assurance
Automation is key to keeping data quality high. Regularly check that tags fire correctly, conversions are counted once, and events match your plan.
Don’t forget to include consent management in your QA — consent status often causes hidden data gaps.
Build the foundation first
Once these five areas are covered in a reliable way, you can finally focus on analysis and activation — the parts that create real business value.
UX, sales, and product teams have their own data needs. But first, we need to serve marketers well.
Because without simple, clean, actionable data, none of the other teams get the clarity they need either.