What counts as a result

The number the whole company celebrates is a count of whatever the tracking was told to call a result.

That instruction was given once, on the day the tracking was installed, by a technical person who was never going to sit in the weekly meeting. Often it was not a decision at all. The purchase event needed a developer and the developer was busy, the add to cart was already firing, so the add to cart became the result, and every report since has been built on top of it.

I have looked inside a great many accounts from the platform side, and the definition is now the first thing I read, before any number. It is almost never what the people receiving the report believe it is. A lead turns out to be a tap on a message button, which is not a message, let alone a lead. A purchase counts twice because the confirmation page reloads. The same sale is claimed by two channels because both were told to claim it. The cost per result in the weekly meeting is an average of several different events, and nobody at that table has read the definition since the week it was written.

What keeps it in place is that a definition is invisible. The number arrives with two decimal places and a colour, and nothing on the screen says which thing fired.

Then everything downstream lines up behind it. Creative is judged against the definition. Budget moves towards it. The agency is paid on it. Somebody is promoted for it.

A result is a definition before it is a number. Most teams are managing to an instruction nobody in the building remembers giving.