Who actually gets the credit for an online sale?

Meta says it made the sale. Google says it made the sale. GA4 says something completely different.

Who should you believe?

You shouldn't rely on any one of them on its own.

The platforms disagree because each one only sees its own slice of the customer journey. When someone sees a Meta ad, searches your brand on Google and buys after an email, every platform can put its hand up and claim the sale.

That part is normal. The bigger issue is what we do with it. And how much time we waste trying to uncover the undisputed attribution “truth” (spoiler: it doesn’t exist).

The platform that reports the sale isn't always the platform that created the demand.

Here's a simple example. Meta introduces someone to your brand. A few days later they search for you by name and click a Google Brand Search ad. Then they buy.

Judge those two campaigns on reported ROAS and Google looks like the hero. Brand Search shows a brilliant return and Meta looks expensive. The obvious move is to shift budget from Meta to Google.

But Google captured demand that Meta helped to create. Cut the Meta spend and the Brand Search numbers can start to slip a few weeks later.

That doesn't mean Meta deserves all the credit either. Brand Search has real value and some prospecting campaigns genuinely don't work. Neither number tells the whole story on its own.

I manage both Meta and Google Ads, so I'm less interested in which platform claims the most revenue. I'm more interested in how they work together and what's happening across the wider business. Are we winning new customers? What's happening to acquisition costs? Is profit growing?

I use ROAS every day, and it's not the answer when viewed in isolation.

I'm going into the detail in this week's newsletter, including how to tell a normal reporting gap from a genuine tracking problem. If you want to understand what your conflicting ad data is really telling you, subscribe to my newsletter.