Why Google Ads reports more sales than your shop

Google Ads shows one number of purchases, Meta another, and your shop a third. Add the two platforms, and they can report more than double the sales the shop recorded. Nobody is lying. Each platform counts every purchase it can connect to its own ads, by its own rules, and those rules overlap.

Why do ad platforms report more sales than the shop?

Because each platform grades itself. Google Ads and Meta both count a purchase when they can link it to one of their ads, and each decides what counts as a link. Your shop counts orders. The gap opens in a handful of places.

Views without a click

Meta’s default attribution setting counts purchases up to 7 days after a link click, and up to 1 day after someone engaged with an ad or only saw it. Google Ads records view-through conversions for video and display ads. A customer who scrolled past an ad in the evening and bought from a Google search the next morning is a Meta conversion.

Long conversion windows

Google Ads counts a purchase up to 30 days after the click by default. A person who clicked an ad on the 1st and came back through your newsletter on the 25th is a Google Ads conversion. In your own reports, the newsletter brought them back.

Other devices

Platforms where people are signed in connect an ad click on the phone with a purchase on the laptop. Your analytics sees two visits it cannot connect, while the platform sees one customer. The credit may be right, and you have no way to check it.

Modeled conversions

Where a platform cannot observe a purchase, for example because the visitor declined cookies, it estimates one. Google Ads includes modeled conversions in its Conversions column. They are estimates rather than orders, and they rise and fall with the model.

Several conversions per click

A purchase action set to count every conversion counts each order a customer places after one click. Two conversion actions for the same purchase, such as the Google Ads tag and an import from GA4, both set as primary, count each order twice.

Two platforms, one order

A customer clicks a Meta ad on Monday, a Google Shopping ad on Wednesday, and orders on Thursday. Your shop has one order. Meta has one conversion, Google Ads has one, and a report that adds the platforms has two.

Click date instead of order date

Google Ads books a conversion on the day of the click by default. Last month’s figures keep growing for weeks as late purchases arrive, and some orders land in a different month than your shop records them.

Test orders, cancellations and refunds widen the gap further: the platform counted them at checkout, and your shop may have removed them since.

Which number should you trust?

Trust each for its own question. The platforms’ conversions feed their bidding, and a campaign optimised on them needs them. Your budget decision needs something else: how many people came through the ad and bought, and what each of them cost. That number has to come from data you own, counted once for all platforms.

How do you get one honest number?

Count buyers from your own purchase events, then join the spend to them.

1. Record the purchase yourself. Send the paid order from your shop, from your server where you can, with its revenue. That is the order your accounting sees, counted once. The setup page shows what you do and what your developer adds.
2. Count people, not conversions. A buyer is a person who bought in the period, counted once however many orders they placed.
3. Tie each buyer to the ad visit that brought them, through the gclid or utm_campaign on that visit. Tagging every campaign makes this work; the guide to UTM parameters for every campaign shows how.
4. Divide spend by buyers. That is cost per buyer; revenue divided by spend is ROAS.
5. Count the total once. A buyer may appear on two campaign rows, but the total counts each person once, so no order is added up twice.

Then put both numbers side by side: the platform’s conversions, which steer its bidding, and your buyers, which judge the budget. How to calculate ROAS and cost per buyer turns them into a break-even line, and the free ROAS calculator does the sums.

How does MIRA FIVE count it?

Connect Google Ads under Data → Sources, and spend, clicks, impressions and the conversions Google reports arrive per campaign and day. MIRA FIVE joins them to visits by utm_campaign or gclid, and only paid visits count: those with an ad click id, or with Google or Meta as source and a paid medium. Buyers and revenue come from your own purchase goal and go to the buyer’s first visit, or under last touch to the last outside visit before the purchase. A buyer credited to two campaigns counts on both rows but once in the total. In the sample shop, Acquisition › Ads shows €312.40 spend, 1,204 clicks, 41 buyers, €2,870 revenue, €7.62 per buyer and a ROAS of 9.2. Buyers need visitors who consented, and Meta Ads is next. The guide to Google Ads cost per buyer walks through the screen.