31.5% of your visitors run ad blockers that kill tracking scripts entirely. When they buy from your WooCommerce store, GA4 and Facebook never see the purchase. You have orders. Your analytics show zero conversions. And you’re wondering what’s broken.

Here’s the thing: zero conversions isn’t one problem. It’s a symptom with multiple possible causes—and all of them stem from the same root issue: client-side tracking depends on perfect conditions that rarely exist.

Why Client-Side Tracking Fails

Traditional WooCommerce tracking works like this: a JavaScript snippet on your thank-you page fires when a customer completes checkout. That script sends conversion data to GA4, Facebook, or whatever platform you’re tracking.

Simple in theory. In practice, this chain breaks constantly:

• Ad blockers: 31.5% of users globally run ad blockers (Statista, 2024) that block gtag.js and the Facebook Pixel before they even load
• Consent rejection: 40-70% of EU visitors reject cookie consent, and Consent Mode V2 blocks all tracking until consent is granted
• Payment redirects: PayPal, Klarna, and other off-site gateways mean customers complete payment but never return to your thank-you page
• Browser privacy: Safari, Firefox, and Brave all have built-in tracking protection that can prevent scripts from executing
• Plugin conflicts: Multiple tracking plugins cancel each other out or fire duplicate events that get deduplicated to zero

If even one customer in three cannot be tracked, zero conversions in some time periods becomes statistically normal.

You may be interested in: The Privacy Browser Trifecta: How Safari, Firefox, and Brave Kill 20-25% of Your Tracking

The Five Causes of Zero Conversions

Before you can fix the problem, you need to identify which cause (or causes) apply to your store. Here’s how to diagnose each one:

Cause 1: Ad Blockers Killing Your Scripts

Ad blockers don’t just block ads—they block tracking scripts. The GA4 gtag.js and Facebook Pixel scripts are on every major blocklist.

How to diagnose:

• Open your store in a private/incognito window with no extensions
• Complete a test purchase
• Check GA4 DebugView or Facebook Events Manager
• If the event appears: ad blockers are your issue

The YouTube comment that surfaces constantly: “Turn off AdBlock during events testing—this was my mistake.” It has 31 likes because it’s such a common trap.

Cause 2: Consent Mode V2 Blocking Everything

Consent Mode V2 enforcement began July 21, 2025. Sites without proper implementation saw tracking disabled entirely for EU visitors.

There are two modes:

• Basic Consent Mode: 100% data loss for non-consenting users. No events fire until consent is granted.
• Advanced Consent Mode: Cookieless pings sent even when consent denied. Enables behavioral modeling—but only if you have enough traffic (more on that below).

How to diagnose:

• Check your consent banner implementation
• Verify you’re using Advanced mode, not Basic
• In GA4, look for the Consent Mode checkbox in Admin → Data Streams

GA4 relies on browser-based tracking affected by consent rejection—expect 15-40% fewer conversions than your actual WooCommerce order count.

Cause 3: Payment Gateway Redirects

This is the silent killer that nobody warns you about.

When a customer pays with PayPal, Klarna, Afterpay, or similar services, they leave your site to complete payment. The “return to merchant” step? Optional. Many customers close the tab after seeing “Payment Complete” on PayPal’s page.

Your thank-you page—where all your tracking scripts live—never loads. The conversion never fires.

How to diagnose:

• Filter WooCommerce orders by payment method
• Compare PayPal orders to PayPal conversions in GA4
• The gap represents customers who never returned to your site

Cause 4: Plugin Conflicts

WordPress.org forum posts tell the same story: “Other events such as Page View and Add to Cart are being tracked properly but Purchase event is not being sent or tracked as expected.”

The cause? Often multiple tracking plugins fighting each other:

• Two GA4 scripts for the same property ID
• Multiple Facebook Pixel implementations
• Old plugins left active when new ones were added

“It’s not uncommon for web admins to install a new pixel plugin and simply forget about their old setup—this can result in redundancy” (PixelYourSite documentation)

How to diagnose:

• List all active plugins that touch tracking
• Use browser developer tools to see how many gtag.js or fbevents.js scripts load
• One script per platform. Multiple = conflict

You may be interested in: Why Your WooCommerce Tracking Plugins Keep Conflicting

Cause 5: Wrong Thank-You Page

Custom checkout flows, one-page checkouts, and non-standard WooCommerce configurations can break the expected order_received page URL.

If your tracking is configured for /checkout/order-received/ but your checkout plugin uses a different path, events never fire.

How to diagnose:

• Complete a test order
• Note the exact URL of your thank-you page
• Compare to what your tracking plugin expects

Systematic Diagnosis Workflow

Run through these steps in order to identify your specific cause:

1. Test with ad blockers disabled (private window, no extensions)
2. Check Consent Mode configuration (Basic vs Advanced, properly implemented)
3. Compare conversion rates by payment method (PayPal gap?)
4. Audit active tracking plugins (how many scripts load?)
5. Verify thank-you page URL (matches tracking config?)

Most stores have more than one issue. A customer with an ad blocker who pays via PayPal and doesn’t return to your site? That conversion was never going to be tracked by client-side methods.

The Server-Side Solution

All five causes share a common thread: they affect JavaScript running in the browser. Server-side tracking bypasses the entire category of problems.

Transmute Engine™ fires purchase events directly from WooCommerce’s payment_complete hook. When an order is paid, the event is captured server-side and sent to GA4, Facebook CAPI, Google Ads, and BigQuery—all before the customer even sees the thank-you page.

The difference:

• Ad blockers: Can’t block server-to-server API calls
• Consent rejection: First-party data captured before consent decision
• Payment redirects: Event fires when payment completes, not when page loads
• Plugin conflicts: Single source of truth, no duplicate scripts
• Wrong thank-you page: Doesn’t matter—event fires from the hook, not the page

Server-side tracking captures conversions from WooCommerce hooks regardless of browser state—no scripts to block, no pages to load, no consent to wait for.

Key Takeaways

• Zero conversions is a symptom, not a diagnosis—identify which of the five causes applies to your store
• 31.5% of users run ad blockers—that alone explains why some conversions will always be missing from client-side tracking
• Payment gateway redirects are the silent killer—PayPal customers who don’t return to your site are invisible to JavaScript tracking
• Expect 15-40% fewer conversions in GA4 than your actual WooCommerce order count when using client-side tracking
• Server-side tracking eliminates all five causes—events fire from WooCommerce hooks, not browser scripts

Ready to capture every conversion regardless of browser state? See how Seresa makes server-side tracking accessible for WooCommerce stores.