Why is ThoughtMetric reporting fewer orders than Facebook?

Discrepancies between ThoughtMetric and Facebook Ads Manager are normal and expected: Facebook overreports its performance by taking too much credit for sales. ThoughtMetric is not designed to report the same sales numbers that Google and Facebook report. We run our own attribution on your data to give you the most accurate and reliable understanding of how many orders are really coming from each of your marketing platforms.

How ad platforms double count

Say a customer clicks a Facebook ad on Monday, clicks a Google ad on Tuesday, and makes a $100 purchase on Friday. Facebook claims full credit for the sale and reports $100 in revenue, completely ignoring the fact that the customer also clicked a Google ad. Likewise, Google Ads also reports $100 in revenue. You now have two ad channels reporting a total of $200 in revenue when you really had one sale for $100.

How ThoughtMetric splits credit

ThoughtMetric knows that the customer clicked both the Facebook ad and the Google ad, and splits the credit for the sale between those two sources. For this reason, ThoughtMetric often reports less revenue from Facebook than Facebook Ads Manager does.

ThoughtMetric is on your team, so we give you an unbiased view of where your sales are really coming from. Configured with server-side tagging and surveys, ThoughtMetric reports the most accurate, closest-to-ground-truth attribution available.