Repairing the Tracking Chain for a Yoga School

The Client

A yoga school that runs teacher trainings and retreats abroad, taught in German, for students mostly from German-speaking countries. Alongside its trainings and retreats, it offers private coaching and online classes.

A teacher training is a big decision made from far away, so almost every student finds the school online, compares programs and dates on the website, then registers or starts a WhatsApp conversation. The school advertises on Google Ads and relies on GA4 and Ads data to decide which campaigns and programs to put its budget behind.

The Problem

The tracking was already in place, but the data flowing through it could not be trusted.

• Broken tagging: parts of the chain from Google Tag Manager to GA4 to Google Ads were not working as intended, so data was lost or arrived incomplete at the next step.
• Statuses that weren't green: tags and conversion actions reported warnings or errors instead of a healthy status, which is often the first visible sign that conversions are going missing.
• Bot traffic in GA4: automated traffic was flooding GA4. Bots inflate sessions and users, drag down engagement and conversion rates, and make every report built on that data misleading.
• A busy WordPress stack: the site runs Google Site Kit, a caching plugin, a multilingual plugin and reCAPTCHA next to GTM. Each of these touches scripts or pages, which makes it harder to see where a broken signal comes from.

Problems like these compound. A tag that misfires in GTM leaves a gap in GA4, and a gap in GA4 or Ads means campaigns are optimized on the wrong numbers.

What I Did

I followed the data through each layer, from the tag that fires in the browser to the conversion that arrives in Google Ads, and fixed each break where it started.

Google Tag Manager fires the tags at the right moment
   ↓
GA4 receives clean, human traffic and the key events
   ↓
Google Ads receives the conversions it bids on

Audit of the data flow
I checked each step from GTM to GA4 to Google Ads: which tags fire, on which triggers, what they send, and whether it arrives at the next layer. Wherever the tagging broke, I fixed the tags, triggers and connections involved.

Every status to green
I worked through the setup until every tag and conversion action showed a healthy, green status, then verified the data actually arriving at each step rather than trusting the status alone.

Bot traffic out of GA4
I identified the bot traffic flooding GA4 and stopped it from distorting the reports, so sessions, engagement and conversion rates reflect real visitors again.

Best practices throughout
Along the way I brought the setup in line with current best practices for GTM, GA4 and Google Ads, so it stays reliable as new pages, programs and campaigns are added.

The Stack

The Result

The school's tracking chain is whole again: the tags fire correctly, GA4 reports on real visitors, and Google Ads receives the conversions it needs.

If you aren't sure your tracking data can be trusted, get in touch.