Purchase tracking broke, and Google Ads couldn’t see order values.
Tickets, memberships and donations all run through one checkout. I cleaned up the GA4 setup underneath it, restored purchase tracking, and gave Google Ads the order values it needed.
- Client
- A public garden with online ticketing and memberships
- Service
- Tracking implementation and repair
- Systems
- GA4, Google Tag Manager, Google Ads, a third-party payment page
- When
- September to October 2026
From broken to reporting values
Dates from the engagement, in 2026.
- August 31
Purchase tracking stops recording.
- September 11
Purchase tracking fixed.
- September 15
GA4 and Tag Manager cleanup documented for the team.
- October 14
Order values start passing to Google Ads.
- October 16 to 22
Google Ads shows purchases with values attached.
- Next
Compare Google Ads with GA4 and reconcile the two.
The question
Two problems were stacked on each other. Duplicate data collection had inflated GA4’s history, and then purchase tracking stopped recording at the end of August. Google Ads was also counting purchases without their value, so the team couldn’t judge campaigns by revenue.
What I did
- Removed a duplicate GA4 data stream and consolidated collection into one.
- Stopped the payment page from showing up as a referral, removed email addresses from recorded page addresses, and filtered out developer traffic.
- Fixed the purchase tag so order numbers record correctly, and removed old Universal Analytics tags and duplicate events.
- Checked how the cookie consent plugin behaved and documented the upgrade it needed.
- Published a Google Ads purchase tag that passes each order’s value, and set up monitoring with the person running the ads.
What it showed, and what stayed open
What it showed
- Purchases recorded again from September 11, covering tickets, memberships and donations.
- The week after the change, Google Ads showed purchases with values attached.
What stayed open
- Data from before the fix still carries the duplicate counts. Fixing collection going forward doesn’t change what was already recorded.
- Google Ads and GA4 still needed to be compared and reconciled.
- Checkout steps before the purchase, such as viewing the cart, were left for later.
Is a conversion missing from your reports?
Tell me what stopped, when you noticed, and which platforms rely on it.