Do Your Platforms Claim More Than You Sold?

The difference between what your ad platforms say they sold and what your store actually sold. You supply both numbers, we divide them. If your platforms collectively claim 150 conversions and your store recorded 85 orders, they are claiming 1.8 times your real sales, and 65 of those claimed conversions cannot be matched to anything you shipped.

Pick last month. In each ad platform, note the conversions it reports for that period and add them up across every platform you run. Then open your store admin and count the orders over the same dates. Use the same conversion definition on both sides, usually a purchase rather than an add to cart, and the comparison holds.

No, and that is the point. There is no industry benchmark anywhere in the arithmetic and no assumption about your business. It is your two numbers divided, so the only thing that can make the answer wrong is the figures you put in.

Usually signal loss rather than accurate reporting. Cookie restrictions, iOS privacy changes and ad blockers stop platforms seeing conversions they genuinely influenced, so they under-count. It is the same measurement problem viewed from the other side: the platform numbers still do not describe your customer journeys, they just miss them instead of duplicating them.

Each platform reports independently, and none of them can see the others. A customer touched by three platforms is counted by all three. A customer who saw an ad without clicking is often counted anyway. Nobody removes conversions that would have happened regardless. None of this is a platform lying, and none of it is a fault in your setup: it is what happens when nobody deduplicates across the whole journey.

Not wasting it, misreading it. A contested conversion is one whose true owner is unclear, not one that was worthless. The practical cost is that your cost per order looks lower than it is, so some channels look cheaper than they are and budget follows the wrong signal. Seeing the disagreement is what lets you move that budget deliberately.

That is the point of it, and the mechanism is worth being precise about. Once you can see which channels genuinely convert rather than which one happened to be last, you can move budget toward the ones earning it, and your ad platforms get cleaner input to optimise against. The gain comes from that reallocation, which is a decision you make with better information. What we will not do is put a number on it: a projected percentage from a vendor who has never seen your data is worth nothing. Treat a guaranteed ROAS lift on a fixed timeline with suspicion, because passing more conversions back to the ad platforms makes the reported figure rise while actual sales stay flat, and that is usually what is being sold. The distinction worth holding onto is that forwarding conversions you actually made, deduplicated against real orders, gives the platform a truer signal to optimise on, while inventing conversions you did not make raises the reported figure and nothing else. The first is checkable against your own store admin, and the second is not.