Case Study: Conversion Tracking as a bridge for cross-departmental strategy in large companies
From Fragments to One Data-Driven System: Making Conversion Tracking Efficient at Scale with kemb
Learn how we helped a global enterprise transform fragmented operations into a unified, data-driven PPC strategy.
Why big organizations might be struggling with their PPC strategy across Business Units
Managing Marketing campaigns in large corporations is not only about keywords, messages and ad creatives. The true challenge lies in navigating complex organizational structures while ensuring that data behind decisions is accurate, consistent, and actionable. Working with our biggest partners we identified the most common pitfalls of large marketing operations that impact efficiency and cost of projects.
For PPC speed and flexibility matter:
- Learning algorithms reward faster data loops : The more quickly you can test ads, push budget into the best performing keywords, and hit conversion thresholds, the more accurate the bidding models become.
- Faster time-to-market means quicker responses to competitors’ promos and faster test-and-learn cycles.
- Flexible organisations with integrated teams (and automated BI pipelines) feed insights directly into campaign adjustments, improving targeting and reducing wasted spend.
About the Clients
For this project, we partnered with one of our clients with a highly complex infrastructure, where multiple Business Units operated in silos.
Since form submissions represented their most important lead generation channel, our priority was to align strategies across all BUs and establish a comprehensive view of a constantly evolving website.
We began by tracking form conversions along the most critical user journeys. However, it quickly became clear that to ensure no valuable conversions were overlooked — especially as user journeys kept changing — we needed to implement tools and automations to monitor, capture, and standardize every possible conversion path.
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In large organizations, agility often determines campaign success versus wasted spend.
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Business Units usually have the resources and expertise, but size and complexity slow down decision-making and execution.
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With our client, we observed that siloed operations hindered the ability to quickly track new pages and user journeys, despite strong internal capabilities.
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We addressed this by introducing a unified conversion tracking framework and automated monitoring, enabling rapid iteration without compromising accuracy.
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Key lesson: In large corporations, agility is not about moving fast in isolation — it’s about aligning departments under a shared data structure.
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With that foundation, organizations gain flexibility to respond faster, scale changes across units, and adapt to dynamic conditions.
Focus on Agility: Lessons from Large Corporations
Project Prerequisites
The Challenges: Silos that break the strategy
Silos, Fragmentation, and the Cost of Misalignment
Cross-departmental communication gaps
Complexity exponentially increases when different Business Units (BU) are involved. BUs often follow their own paths and have their own internal structures in place, not to mention the human factor and the exponential increase of personalities and workstyles. In practice, all of these factors can:
> low down campaign launches and lead to frustration
> Make it more difficult to align goals, meet deadlines, and maintain necessary documentation
> Prevent profiting from new arising campaign opportunities
Quick deployment can mean the difference between high quality lead generation and irrelevance.
Fragmented Tracking Infrastructure
Big companies often rely on a patchwork of analytics platforms, ad networks, CRM systems, and BI tools. The lack of seamless integration leads to:
> inconsistent reporting and a reliance on manual reconciliation.
> outdated tracking codes, old pixels, or forgotten tags that keep clustering the set up: leading to duplication, data discrepancies, and unreliable insights
> inconsistencies in naming campaigns, events, or audiences that create chaos when reports are aggregated globally
The lack of standardized taxonomy makes cross-department reporting nearly impossible without manual intervention.
Attribution & Data Quality Problems
With customer journeys spanning many touchpoints, isolating PPC’s true impact is difficult. Without strong data pipelines, we risk:
> oversimplification and misallocation of budgets.
> making decisions without data that is accurate, consistent, and actionable
> underreporting of conversions, broken audience targeting, and ultimately gaps in measurement accuracy
> Skewed reporting due to mismatched UTM parameters, inconsistent campaign IDs, and duplicate conversions
Misaligned units on consent, strategy, and compliance risk producing unreliable, non-actionable data.
Our Approach: Tracking for Paid Marketing as a Bridge
Communication Cadence
PPC campaigns evolve quickly, and small misalignments can snowball into major tracking or reporting issues. To prevent this:
- We hold weekly or bi-weekly check-ins to align on campaign performance, upcoming launches, and compliance concerns.
- Sessions go beyond status updates: they ensure we understand each Business Unit’s needs at that specific moment in time.
Documentation
Lack of shared documentation is one of the most common pitfalls in large PPC operations. We solve this with:
- Clear Naming Conventions & Guidelines – one standard, applied across all teams. We make sure we have one tracking and naming convention that is clear for all parties involved.
- Continuous Cleanup – as projects evolve, we use Asana and Notion to refine tools, document fixes, and improve clarity for long-term usability.
Robust Tracking Implementation
Using GTM as the single source of truth, data is sent to all ad platforms via the same triggers — making corrections and adjustments scalable across campaigns.
- We send key data to CRMs to align marketing and sales — fully GDPR- and CCPA-compliant, controlling what information is sent and when.
- Automated monitoring keeps track of pages, journeys, and conversions, ensuring a fast, scalable backend.
Scalability & Future-Proofing
As we moved forward with our work we developed automations that make it easier to report, collect data and detect errors. We use automated processes that:
- Ensure all forms send complete, standardized data to CRM systems, no matter their structure.
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Implement checks and feed insights back to ad platforms to improve campaign performance.
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Report and notify key stakeholders in time.
Project Outcomes
Paving the way to coverage and seamless data pipelines
Through the rollout of our conversion tracking framework, we transformed a fragmented setup into a scalable system that covers the complexity of our partner ’s business. What began with tracking just 1 page and 1 form has grown into a robust structure that ensures all Business Units have their most important lead-generating forms represented.
This growth was not only quantitative but also qualitative. Processes are now smooth enough to handle complexity at scale: errors can be quickly identified, user journeys are comprehensively covered, and marketing teams can act on consistent and reliable data. For Google Ads alone, we now track and optimize for 57 high-value lead generation forms, linking ad spend directly to meaningful business outcomes.
Although not measurable, the amount of time we now dedicate to find the user journeys and all important conversions along them compared with what we had in the beginning is significantly lower. We are now able to dedicate our expertise into strategy instead of operational load. Most importantly, conversion tracking has evolved into more than just a reporting tool. It has become a strategic enabler, bridging Marketing, BI, sales by creating one shared language of performance.
Visual Insights
From Silos to unified strategy: Tracking Coverage
Pages tracked: from 1 at the start → 88 mid-project → 225 by project end (covering 5.46% of all website pages).
Forms tracked: from 1 at the start → 74 mid-project → 275 by project end (covering nearly 49% of all website forms).
Tags activated (for Google ads): from just 3 tags initially → 57 at project end , ensuring coverage for every critical conversion point.
The complexity of running PPC in large organizations rarely comes down to campaigns alone—it is fundamentally about alignment. Without a shared data foundation, marketing, BI, and sales risk working in silos, losing speed, and missing opportunities. Our work demonstrates that conversion tracking can be the bridge between these departments: not just a technical setup, but a strategic enabler. By building a scalable tracking infrastructure, enforcing clear documentation, and embedding communication cadences, we’ve turned fragmented operations into a unified system. This empowers stakeholders across Business Units to act faster, optimize with confidence, and tie marketing investments directly to business outcomes.
Conclusion & Next Steps
If your organization is struggling with fragmented tracking, siloed teams, or unreliable PPC reporting, it’s time to rethink your foundation. At Kemb, we help enterprises turn conversion tracking into a strategic advantage—one that aligns departments, accelerates decision-making, and drives measurable growth.