The attribution gap: why your platforms over-count conversions

Ask Google, Meta and TikTok how many purchases they drove last month, add the answers together, and compare the total with your order system. For most advertisers the platforms claim somewhere between 1.3 and 2 times the real number. Nobody is lying. Each platform is simply counting from its own point of view.

Where double counting comes from

Overlapping journeys

A typical buyer sees a video ad, clicks a search ad a week later and buys after a retargeting ad. Each platform saw a touchpoint inside its attribution window, so each one claims the sale.

Generous windows

Default windows like seven-day click and one-day view are long enough to catch purchases that would have happened anyway. View-through conversions are the biggest source of inflation, especially for brands with strong organic demand.

Modelled conversions

Since privacy changes limited tracking, platforms fill gaps with modelled conversions. The models are reasonable, but they are tuned to each platform’s own data and rarely agree with each other.

Closing the gap

The fix is not to pick one platform to believe. It is to build a single source of truth that starts from your own conversions and assigns credit across channels once. In practice that means three steps.

First, send server-side conversion events with a shared order ID, so every sale can be matched and deduplicated. In Reticle this is the order_id field on each event. Second, compare platform-reported conversions with your deduplicated total every week and track the ratio by channel. A rising ratio is an early sign that a channel is claiming more than it earns. Third, validate the model with periodic holdout tests, pausing a channel in a few regions to measure the real lift.

What changes when the numbers agree

Once the totals reconcile, budget conversations get shorter. Teams stop arguing over which dashboard is right and start asking which channel deserves the next dollar. That is the question predictive budgets are designed to answer. You can see which plans include deduplicated attribution on the pricing page, or book a walkthrough.