Chasing a false alarm metric for 3 weeks, our CTO finally spotted the tag bug

We kept seeing a spike in demo signups from LinkedIn ads, but the leads were garbage. Turns out our UTM tagging was double-appending campaign IDs since the last CMS update. Has anyone else had analytics tools quietly corrupting their tracking params after a platform change?

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craig.mila8d ago

Ugh, yeah, we had almost the exact same thing happen after a WordPress plugin update last year. Our Facebook pixel was double counting page views because the old plugin's code was still firing in the background, and the new one was also sending events. It took us way too long to realize because the numbers looked great, just way too great. What finally helped was building a quick test page with a raw UTM string, clicking through the whole flow, and then checking what actually landed in the analytics backend, not just the dashboard. We also started tagging every single campaign param with a date stamp, so if something breaks we can spot it by looking at when the weird data started. That saved us the next time a platform glitched, we caught it in a day instead of weeks.