Skip to content

No account required

Start a project

5 min · 4 sections

Analysis for people buying traffic.

Every platform reports a number that is true from where it is standing, and they sum to more customers than exist.

By Data Analysis App team

Why do my ad platforms report more conversions than I have orders?

Because each platform counts a conversion by its own attribution window, so the same customer is claimed by more than one and the totals exceed the orders that exist. Reconcile platform-reported conversions against your own order records and credit each channel with what can be traced, counting every unmatched claim rather than dropping it.

Section 01

The gap is the first number to produce

Add up what every platform claims and compare it against the orders you actually took. That single figure is the size of the double counting and is usually larger than people expect.

It is also the number that makes the rest of the analysis legible, because every channel-level figure is inflated by some share of it.

Section 02

Credit what can be traced

Match platform conversions against order records and credit each channel with what it can be tied to, counting the unmatched claims separately rather than discarding them.

Without a channel field on the orders, matching falls back to time and value, which is weaker. Say so rather than presenting the same confidence on worse evidence.

The unmatched pile is not waste. It is the measurement of how much of your attribution is inference.

Section 03

Spend against contribution, not revenue

Revenue per channel flatters whichever one sells discounted, high-return products, and that is frequently the channel with the best-looking return.

Where product costs exist, set spend against contribution instead. That is the number that decides whether a campaign is worth running, and it occasionally reverses the ranking entirely.

Section 04

What to upload

Your own order data covering the period, since that is the table the figures are computed from: one table, whichever is largest. Column names differ by platform and by year, so they are matched by content rather than by an expected header.

The platform reports and any product cost sheet can go up alongside. Each is read, converted and handed back as a download, and the report names any relationship it can see, but no figure is computed across two files, so setting spend against contribution is a comparison you make from the two outputs.

See it on a real project

Product A produced 68% of total growth while repeat purchasing fell from 31% to 24%.

What is making this store's growth less durable?

Keep reading

Every check in this guide runs on every upload.

Drop the file in and the problems described here are tested before anything is reported: with the rows behind each repair kept, so you can see exactly what changed.

  • Subtotal rows detected and excluded
  • Duplicates matched on identity, not on whole rows
  • Text-typed numbers found, coerced and counted

No account needed to start. You only pay when you like what you see.