1 pointby marstay5 hours ago1 comment
  • marstay5 hours ago
    Hi HN,

    I’ve spent the last few months debugging a pattern I kept seeing on client sites:

    Ads are running, tags are installed, dashboards look fine — but Google Ads conversions are missing, inconsistent, or silently degraded.

    In most cases, the problem wasn’t the conversion tag itself. It was consent timing:

    tracking scripts firing before consent

    cookies set before consent

    Consent Mode v2 present but misconfigured

    conversion events firing before consent updates

    These setups often “look” correct in GTM or DevTools, but behave differently for a real first-time visitor.

    So I built a small scanner that loads a site like a new user would and checks:

    what scripts fire before consent

    whether cookies are set pre-consent

    whether Consent Mode v2 is actually configured

    whether conversions would fire after consent

    The output is a technical report with detected issues and suggested fixes (mostly small configuration changes).

    This is not a compliance/legal tool — it’s meant as a debugging aid for people working with Google Ads, GA4, and consent setups.

    I’m sharing it here mainly for feedback from people who’ve dealt with consent/tracking edge cases, false positives, or odd GTM behavior.

    Happy to answer technical questions or explain how detection works.