Tracking
A store that was tracking visits and nothing else
Ads were running and orders were arriving, but the ad platform only ever saw page views. The purchase event had been installed on the theme, and the theme had been swapped out weeks earlier, which quietly took the event with it. We moved the events off the theme so they survive a theme change, then re-checked them against orders that had already happened. Lesson we now apply on every audit: an event that was verified once is not verified today.
Attribution
Orders with no way to tell which ad produced them
Every order landed in the store with the source blank, so the only attribution available was whatever the ad platform claimed for itself. The fix was unglamorous: campaign parameters filled in on every ad, without exception, so the creative name travels with the order. It costs a minute per ad and it is the difference between knowing which video sells and guessing.
Checkout
A cart that would not let people remove things
The cart drawer accepted additions but silently failed to remove items, and sold-out variants could still be added. Nobody complained, they just left, so the store looked like it had a traffic quality problem rather than a broken cart. We found it by sitting through session recordings instead of reading the funnel report. Now we watch recordings before we blame the traffic.
Advertising
A creative we killed before it had said anything
We turned off an ad on a high-ticket funnel after a small amount of spend, using a threshold borrowed from a completely different kind of product. On an offer where one sale is worth many times a physical product sale, that threshold was far too low to have produced a single readable signal. We now set the kill threshold from the value of one conversion on that specific funnel, and write it down before the ad goes live.