All three platforms claim the same sale
Meta counts a seven-day click, Google the last click, TikTok seven/one day. Why the dashboards add up to more than your actual revenue, and how to bring the comparison onto common ground.
Anyone who has added up conversions across three dashboards and compared the total with the accounts has seen the same picture: the dashboards see more sales. That is not a bug, it is what attribution does. Each platform counts its own contribution by its own rules, and none of them knows what the others counted.
The windows are not the same
An attribution window says how many days after a click a sale still gets credited to that click. Platform defaults differ, and that difference alone is enough to make the totals disagree. If the same person clicks a Meta ad, then arrives three days later through a Google search and buys, both platforms can see that sale.
- Write down each platform’s window setting before you compare anything; do not assume the defaults match.
- Keep view-through attribution separate. A conversion credited without a click is a different claim and does not belong in the same table.
- Changing the window changes history too; pick one and stay loyal to it in reporting.
Common ground: a single source of truth
Platform dashboards are the right tool for in-channel optimisation, but they cannot referee a cross-channel comparison — every one of them is an interested party. The common ground is your own order data: how many orders arrived, with which source parameter, worth how much.
A practical method
- Keep each platform’s reported conversions in its own column; do not add them together.
- Put total orders from your own order system next to them.
- Track the gap as a ratio. A stable ratio means your reporting is consistent; a drifting one means a setting changed somewhere.
- Make budget decisions with that ratio in mind, rather than taking dashboard numbers at face value.
If you genuinely want to measure the split between channels, the route is an experiment rather than a dashboard comparison: switch one channel off for a defined period and watch what total revenue does. It is an expensive method and not every account can run it, but it is the only one that answers honestly.