MeasurementEditorial draft pending
Why your channel reports don't add up
Every platform reports the conversions it can see and credits itself generously. Here is why the totals disagree, and what to fix before trusting any of them.
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Most businesses running several acquisition channels have the same experience at the end of a quarter: every channel report looks defensible, and the total does not match what the business actually booked. Nobody is lying. The reports are simply answering different questions.
Why the totals disagree
Each platform reports the conversions it can see, inside its own attribution window, and credits itself generously. Two platforms can both take full credit for the same sale, and neither is wrong by its own definition.
- Different attribution windows, compared as though they were the same.
- Modelled conversions counted alongside observed ones, without distinction.
- A conversion event that means something different in each system.
- No reconciliation against the business's own records.
A number you cannot reconcile is not a measurement. It is an opinion with a decimal point.
What to fix first
The fix is rarely a better dashboard. It is agreeing what counts as a conversion, capturing it once, and reconciling platform-reported numbers against your own records often enough to know the ratio. That is the work described under performance marketing and conversion optimization.
Still to write
- A worked example of two platforms double-counting one sale.
- How to decide what a conversion is worth before instrumenting it.
- What a reconciliation cadence looks like in practice.