The tracking bottleneck

Smart Bidding, Advantage+, attribution models, and marketing mix models cannot be better than the conversion data they're fed. Broken, duplicated, late, or value-less signals cap results no matter how sophisticated the layers above them are.

#It moves the problem upstream of strategy

Most optimization advice assumes the inputs are fine and argues about the layers on top: which bid strategy, which attribution model, which creative framework. A platform optimizing toward bad conversions doesn't just mis-report. It mis-spends, because every automated bid is a decision made on that data. That's why fixing signal quality outranks switching bid strategies: widening any other part of the pipe does nothing while the bottleneck holds.

In practice: this is the problem Buron works on continuously. Health checks run on the conversion signal, so defects surface before they become spend.

The full argument, with the four signal defects and how to fix each one: The tracking bottleneck: your bids are only as good as your signal.