Ads, forms and tracking break quietly. I check them on a schedule.

Google Ads has a dozen quiet ways to stop spending while the status column stays green. A campaign end date somebody set months ago. A card that failed once and paused the whole account. A daily budget gone by early afternoon, so the evening searches, the ones that turn into bookings, never see an ad. A disapproved ad in a group that only had one. None of these send you an email you would open. The account goes quiet, and the monthly report explains it after the fact.

So the check reads the account, not the status. Did the campaign spend today, and roughly what it spends on a normal day? Did impressions fall off against the same weekday last week? Is the budget gone before the day is? A wrong answer is a failed check, and a failed check comes to me. In the one account I can point to, reading it caught a campaign that had sat dark for nine days heading into summer, relit the same day. The daily check that watches that account was built after that catch. The case study tells it straight, including what I do not claim. The longer version of how ads go dark, and what the daily check reads, is in why Google Ads stop without anyone being told.

This is the failure that costs the most and shows the least. A form can look perfect, say thank you and deliver nothing, because the plugin updated, the sending address lost its authentication, an inbox rule changed, or the booking software rotated a key. Nobody finds out until someone phones to ask why you never replied.

So the check does not ask the form whether it works. It fills the form in. On every run a clearly labelled test enquiry goes through the real form on the live site, the same path a customer takes, and the check waits to see it arrive where your enquiries land. If it does not arrive, that is the failure, and I treat it as a customer's enquiry gone missing, because the next one will be. The test entries carry a fixed label, you get the label, and if a form cannot be tested safely I say so.

Conversion tracking is wiring, and wiring gets cut by ordinary work: a theme update, a new form plugin, a redesign, a cookie banner, a developer tidying up scripts. The ads keep spending and the reports keep drawing lines, but the events that tell Google and Meta which clicks became customers stop arriving, so the bidding drifts on stale data. If you want the definition, I wrote up what conversion tracking is in one article, and what to check yourself after a site change is in why tracking dies after a website update. This page is only about noticing when it stops.

So the check looks for the events themselves. It loads the pages that matter, walks the path a customer takes, and confirms the expected events reach your analytics and your ad platforms in the count they should. A drop to zero after a deploy is the obvious case. A drop to half, because one of two forms lost its tag, is the one that hides for months, so the check compares against what was normal, not against nothing. Server-side tracking survives more of these changes than browser tags do, and when it is the right fix I say so. If the site is being rebuilt, the wiring gets tested before launch; that is the build's job, not this page's.

Most monitoring tools alert a dashboard nobody is looking at on a Saturday morning. Here, a failed check reaches me, and I am the one who reads it. The same day I find out, one of two things happens. If it is a fix, I fix it: relight the campaign, re-authenticate the form's sending address, put the tag back. If it is a decision, you get a short note that says what happened, what it means and the choice in front of you, and nothing changes in your account until you say so.

What I will not put on this page is an alert window. A window promised on a page is a marketing number, and I would rather show you the record. The check runs every scheduled day. Every run leaves a receipt like the one above, the run log is available on request, and a person reads it every week. Month to month, and the accounts, the data and the finished work are yours; there is no software of mine to rent.