Full Answer

Tracking plugin breakage falls into two categories. The first is immediate: a WooCommerce update changes the hook the plugin relies on, and purchase events stop firing entirely. The second is silent: the hook still fires but returns incomplete data — missing order values, empty product arrays, or null customer fields — which feeds corrupted events to your ad platforms without triggering any visible errors.

Silent breakage is more dangerous because Google Ads Smart Bidding and Facebook's optimization algorithm continue running on the bad data, degrading campaign performance before the problem is noticed. Server-side tracking that fires from WooCommerce order-creation hooks rather than checkout page JavaScript is inherently more stable: these hooks are deeper in the order processing flow and change less frequently than front-end checkout events.