My store recorded 80 paid orders last week, excluding cancelled and test orders. For the same dates, Meta Ads reports 48 purchases and Google Ads reports 51. Adding the two gives me more purchases than actually happened, even before counting email or organic traffic.
Both accounts use purchase conversion tracking. Meta also receives purchases through the Pixel and Conversions API. I haven’t checked whether both platforms report conversions against the click date or the purchase date.
What I’m trying to separate
- The same order being credited to more than one advertising platform.
- A purchase event being sent twice within one platform.
- Differences caused by conversion attribution windows or view-through credit.
What checks would distinguish those cases? I don’t want to label the tracking broken just because the totals don’t add up, but I also don’t want to overlook duplicate events.
For a weekly budget review, how should I compare platform-reported purchases with actual store orders without pretending they measure exactly the same thing?
