AuditTag Guardrails, early access
A theme ships, a checkout is rebuilt, a new tag goes in. Any of those can quietly strip a tracking tag or install one twice. Guardrails re-reads a few of your public pages on a schedule and tells you when a tag it has seen disappears or doubles up, instead of you finding out from a dip in next month's numbers.
Early access. I set each site up by hand and only take as many as I can check every Monday. Right now that is 10 sites in total.
Guardrails reads your public pages and tells you when a tag it has seen disappears or doubles up. It does not say whether a purchase fired.
See early access pricing Start with a free audit
Guardrails, weekly note
ashcombecoffee.example
Checked on Monday 5 October. We read 6 of 6 pages we watch for ashcombecoffee.example.
Nothing has changed since Monday 28 September. Every tag we had seen is still on your pages.
Tags present
We found 3 tags on your pages, GA4, Google Tag Manager and Meta Pixel.
We did not find Google Ads. Not finding Tag Manager or Google Ads is fine if you do not use them.
On-page issues
The audit found 9 on-page issues, 1 of them critical, on the pages we watch. It is the same audit as the free report.
If a tag you expect is not on the list, or one is listed that should not be, just reply to this email.
Guardrails reads your public pages and tells you when a tag it has seen disappears or doubles up. It does not say whether a purchase fired.
Your campaigns keep running. Your dashboards keep loading. Your team keeps making decisions. But a tag may have gone from the pages, and nothing on the page looks different. Guardrails watches for that one thing, a tag it has seen going missing or doubling up. It cannot see whether a purchase event still fires. Only a test order shows that.
Together we pin four to eight public pages, such as your home page, a collection, a product and the cart. On a schedule, at least once a week, Guardrails reads the HTML each one serves, the same way the free audit does. It never logs in.
It works out which of the main tracking tags each page serves (GA4, Tag Manager, Google Ads and Meta Pixel), with their IDs and how many pages carry each one. It keeps that as a record, and the next check is compared with it.
When a tag it has seen is gone, or a second ID or a second copy appears, the message names the tag, its ID, how many pages had it before and now, and a snippet hash. It reads the page again after a short wait before it says a tag has gone.
A snippet hash is a 12 character fingerprint of a tag's code, worked out after comments, spaces and cache-busting parameters such as v= are removed. If a tag comes back with the same hash, it is the same snippet. If the hash is different, the snippet was edited or replaced. A page it recognises as a security check, a password page or an error is recorded as unread and is not reported as a missing tag. It reads a page again before it says a tag has gone, and if it ever gets one wrong, reply to the email and I will look at it.
A design of an alert for a fictional store. It shows the proof an alert carries, so you can check it against your own pages, and it says plainly what it cannot know.
Guardrails alert
Meta Pixel is no longer on your pages
On Monday 28 September we saw Meta Pixel (1234567890123) on 6 of 6 pages we read for ashcombecoffee.example. On Monday 5 October it was on 0 of 6 pages.
We read the page again after a short wait to be sure, and it was still missing.
The snippet we saw before has the snippet hash 9f3a1c2b7d4e. Nothing on the page has that hash now.
This is the start of the snippet we saw before.
<script>!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){...} fbq('init', '1234567890123');
Common causes are a theme update that replaced the file the snippet lived in, or an app that was switched off. That is a guess from how these usually go, not something we saw on your site.
Once it is back, place a test order and look for the purchase in Meta Events Manager. That is the only way to know a purchase is arriving.
Alert reference gr-ashcombe-1
If this alert looks wrong, just reply to this email. The person who reads it built Guardrails, and a wrong alert goes on the public list of things we got wrong.
Everything here is scoped to the tracking tags that carry your revenue signal, as your pages serve them. Each capability is labelled with where it honestly stands today.
window.dataLayer against a GA4 ecommerce schema, once you send me one.The free audit and the Fix Packs are live and automated today. Guardrails is in early access. The page reader, the tag comparison, the snippet hashes and the alert wording are built and tested. What is not switched on yet is email sent by the software itself, so for now I set each site up by hand and I send the emails myself, alongside any Slack or webhook message. There is no customer dashboard, and the designs on this page are designs of the emails, not screenshots of a finished product. Guardrails reads the pages your site serves, so it can tell you a tag has gone missing or doubled up, not whether a purchase fired on a real order. That takes a test order, and I will say so rather than guess. When something goes wrong, the person who reads your email is the person who wrote the code. Reach me at hello@audittag.com. I reply the same working day, Monday to Friday, UK time. Weekends wait until Monday.
A rough estimate from numbers you can change. A missing conversion tag doesn't just lose reporting. It can degrade the signals your advertising platforms optimise on, for as long as it goes unnoticed. The 10% to 25% band is my assumption. I have not measured it.
An estimate from your own numbers and an assumed 10% to 25% waste band. On-page and tracking fixes improve how reliably your spend is measured and bid on. They are not a traffic machine, and I won't pretend otherwise. Your real result depends on your platforms and how they rebid. Guardrails is billed in pounds sterling whatever currency your ad spend is in.
Early access. I set each site up by hand and only take as many as I can check every Monday. Right now that is 10 sites in total. The one-off Fix Pack and the full price ladder are on the homepage.
For one store or business
During early access I write those emails and send them myself.
Email me with the number of stores and I will tell you honestly what is ready.
Billed monthly in GBP. This reads your public pages and cannot tell you whether a purchase fired. Cancel any time by email or on the cancel page.
No. Guardrails reads your public pages the same way the free audit does. There is no login to hand over, no plugin with write access, and nothing that can change your site. Never write access.
The page reader, the tag comparison, the snippet hashes and the alert wording are built and tested. Email sent by the software itself is not switched on for any customer yet. During early access I set each site up by hand and I send the emails myself. There is no customer dashboard. I would rather tell you that than pretend one exists.
The main tracking tags in the HTML of your pinned pages, which are GA4, Google Tag Manager, Google Ads and Meta Pixel. It tells you when one it has seen is gone from the pages, when a second GA4, Meta Pixel or Google Ads ID appears, or when the same tag is installed twice, once in your theme code and once through an app (for GA4, only where the app copy sends page views). It also runs the same on-page audit as the free report on those pages, and new on-page issues are mentioned in the Slack or webhook message. It reads the pages your site serves, so it does not watch an event fire on a real order and it does not check consent. Those need a real browser and a test order, and they are on the roadmap.
Each site can have a private post-deploy link. Call it from your deploy pipeline (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Vercel, or anything that can send a request) and Guardrails runs the check straight away instead of waiting for the next scheduled one. Ask me for your site's link when I set you up. A call looks like this.
curl -X POST "https://audittag.com/api/monitor/check?id=YOUR_SITE_ID&token=YOUR_TOKEN"
Failing a build on staging before a release goes out is on the roadmap, not live.
Right now, to a Slack or webhook address you give me (anything that accepts JSON), and I email you myself as well. When the software sends the email itself, this page will say so. Every alert names the tag and its ID, how many pages had it before and now, and the snippet hash. If an alert looks wrong, reply to it. A wrong alert goes on the public list of things I got wrong.
Run the free audit. It costs nothing, needs no account, and shows you the state of your tracking today. If it is worth watching, join early access from the Starter card or email me, and we choose your pinned pages from that audit. I reply the same working day, Monday to Friday, UK time. Weekends wait until Monday.
Email hello@audittag.com and I cancel it in Stripe the same working day. The steps, and what happens to your data, are on the cancel page.
Start with the free audit. It shows which tracking tags your pages carry today, and Guardrails watches them from there.