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Well Google is more likely to be more accurate than Meta’s ad manager. Meta will let you set an attribution windows, so making it something like 7 days vs 28 days is a good place to start. You can also set it to look at clicks and not clicks & views as well. Not just going with the default attribution is the best way forward.
You can also look at what numbers show up in GA4 and use that as your source of truth. We have had clients comes to us because Meta was reporting revenue numbers that made no sense. A few clients turned off Meta based on our recommendation to see what would happen, revenue barely dropped for those brands. Meta was not driving as much business as anyone said.
Beyond using Meta’s ad manager, our agency will use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) data to look at what ads are driving revenue by looking at which Meta ads have purchases in GA4. Keep in mind that GA4 won’t capture every purchase for paid social ad platforms but will capture some, so it’s a good 2nd star. Your results are somewhere between what Meta says and what GA4 says. Just a question of how much over reporting is Meta doing.
If they are spending $20K+ per month on Meta and it is working, then you should see tons of ads with attributed purchases in GA4. Those are the ads I would spend more money on. You need a well named campaign, ad set and ad structure to make this work and using dynamic UTM parameters are standard these days for running Meta really well. Then based on that data we can do the following for clients:
* Top Ads Report: build a report showing the best ads from the last year and all time
* Ad Creative Report: Send a weekly report on what is doing the best and why we think it is doing well.
* Creative Inspiration: Between our DTC Brand Index and seeing what works across 15+ other ecom brands, we always send over new ad creative ideas for clients to testIn the end, building a source of truth is about knowing how to use the tools and what the pros and cons of each tool are.
