Why your ad platforms report more sales than you made

Here is a conversation we have with business owners all the time. Google Ads says it brought in a certain number of sales last month. Facebook says it brought in a good number too. Add the two together and you get more sales than your online shop actually recorded. Sometimes a lot more.

So which one is wrong?

Usually, neither. Each platform is following its own rules, and those rules are written to give that platform as much credit as it can reasonably claim. The problem isn’t that anyone is lying. It’s that nobody is keeping score from your side of the counter.

The same customer, counted twice

Think about how people actually buy. Someone sees your ad on Instagram while scrolling on the bus. A few days later they search for your brand on Google, click a paid search ad and buy.

Facebook sees that this person was shown its ad and later bought, so it counts a sale. Google sees that this person clicked its ad and then bought, so it counts a sale too. One customer, one order, two sales in your reports.

Neither platform can see what the other one did. Each one only knows about its own ads, so each one reports the sale as its own. When you add up their reports, you’re counting that customer twice.

Each platform sets its own rules

Every ad platform decides for itself how long after someone sees or clicks an ad it will still take credit for a sale. Some also count sales from people who only saw an ad and never clicked it.

Those settings can usually be changed, but most businesses never look at them. They were set up when the account was created, often by someone who has since moved on, and they quietly shape every number you see.

None of this is hidden or underhand. It’s in the settings. But it means the platforms are each answering a slightly different question, and none of them are answering the one you care about: how many extra sales did this ad actually bring in?

Tracking that counts things it shouldn’t

Double counting between platforms is one problem. Double counting inside a single platform is another, and it’s more common than you’d think.

We often find that the tracking code on a website is recording a sale more than once. A customer reloads the order confirmation page, or the code was added twice during a website update, or an app on your online shop is sending the same sale as a second copy of your tracking. To the ad platform, each of those looks like a new sale.

The reverse happens too. Some sales are never recorded at all, because a checkout page was changed or a payment provider sends customers to a different page at the end. Those gaps make some campaigns look worse than they are.

Why it matters for your budget

If you’re spending a few hundred dollars a month on ads, a bit of over-counting is annoying but not serious. Once you’re spending thousands a month, it starts to drive real decisions.

Ad budgets usually follow the numbers. The campaign that reports the most sales gets more money. If that campaign is mostly taking credit for customers who were going to buy anyway, you end up moving money towards ads that don’t make much difference, and away from the ones that do.

The platforms also use these numbers to decide who to show your ads to. If they’re learning from a sale that was counted twice, or from people who were always going to buy, they get better at finding more of the same.

What to do about it

You don’t need to be a data specialist to get a clearer picture. Start with these steps.

Pick one source of truth. Your online shop, your accounts software or your customer database knows how many sales you actually made. Treat that as the final word, and treat the ad platforms’ numbers as their opinion.

Compare them every month. Add up the sales each platform claims for the month and put that next to the real total. The gap tells you how much over-counting is going on. Watch whether it grows or shrinks over time.

Test your tracking. Place a test order or send a test enquiry and check that each platform records it once, and only once. Do this again every time your website changes.

Look at the settings. Check how each platform decides what counts as a sale, and write it down. If two people in your business look at different settings, they’ll get different answers.

Judge campaigns on what changed. The fairest test is whether your real sales go up when you spend more, and down when you spend less. That’s harder to measure than a number on a dashboard, but it’s the question that matters.

When to get help

If you’ve compared the numbers and the gap is large, or you can’t work out where the extra sales are coming from, it’s worth having someone check properly. That means looking at how each platform is set up, testing the tracking on your website, and lining up what each platform claims against your actual orders, campaign by campaign.

That’s what our Ads & Analytics Audit does. You get a written report showing which numbers you can trust, a list of fixes in order of cost, and a call to talk it through. If you’d like a quick read on where you stand first, take the free Data Maturity Assessment. It takes about four minutes.

You might also find these useful: what a Google and Facebook ads audit actually checks and five signs your ad tracking is broken.