Most advertisers assume their tracking is working. It's not — at least not fully. If you're running a JavaScript-based pixel or even a server-side solution that isn't edge-based, a defensible, proven number is that 30% of your ad spend is being wasted — going to the wrong audiences, attributing the wrong conversions, and training your algorithms on bad signals.

This isn't about fraud or bad creative. It's about your pixel feeding your ad platform the wrong conversion signals — specifically, taking credit for returning customers and warm traffic it had nothing to do with. When your pixel counts a returning customer who would have purchased anyway, your algorithm thinks it found a winner. It doubles down. More budget chases people who were already going to buy.

Our observations across accounts: without edge-based tracking, cold traffic hovers around 30% of the audience being optimized toward. With proper edge-based CAPI imports, cold traffic jumps to ~60%. That's not a 30% improvement — it's a 100% increase in cold audience reach, but the dollar value of that shift represents roughly 30 cents of every dollar being redirected to where it should have been going all along. The floor is 30% improvement. The ceiling — in cases like 4imprint where returning customers dominated reported conversions — can be 300%+.

There's a common misconception that moving to server-side tracking solves this. It doesn't. Server-side still runs on JavaScript — meaning it's still vulnerable to consent loss, ad blockers, and privacy restrictions (iOS, browser-level). Edge-based tagging operates at the network level, upstream of all of that. The distinction matters enormously for signal quality and completeness.

Edge tagging's primary value isn't better in-platform reporting. It's better feed data — cleaner signals to the algorithm so it can find genuinely new customers rather than recycling warm ones. That's why pairing edge tagging with first-click attribution matters: you're telling the platform "this is the touchpoint that actually introduced someone new," rather than letting it take credit for every interaction with people who were already in your funnel.