Why your ad platforms say you made more sales than you did

Here is a test that takes five minutes. Open each of your ad accounts and write down how many sales it says it produced last month. Add them up. Now look at how many sales you actually made.

For a lot of businesses the first number is bigger than the second. Nobody is lying to you, exactly. But nobody is giving you a number you can use, either.

Every platform marks its own homework

Each ad platform only sees its own ads. So each one answers a narrow question: did someone who saw one of my ads go on to buy?

Now follow one real customer. She sees your ad on Google on Monday while searching. On Wednesday she sees another on Instagram. On Friday she buys.

Google counts that sale. So does Meta. If she had also watched a TikTok, there would be three platforms each reporting one sale — and one order in your store.

Why it is getting worse, not better

Browsers and phones block more tracking every year. When a platform cannot see what happened, it increasingly fills the gap with an estimate. Estimates are not wrong to make, but they are made by the party that benefits from a bigger number.

What this does to your decisions

If you judge your ads by the platforms' own reports, every channel looks like it is working, so you keep paying for all of them. The reports cannot tell you which one you could switch off without losing a single customer — and that is the only question that saves you money.

Start from the order, not the ad

There is one record in your business that cannot be double-counted: the order. It exists once, in your store, with a real amount of money attached. For a trade business, the equivalent is the phone call that became a booked job.

Measure backwards from there:

• Start with the sales you really made.
• For each one, look at what the customer did before buying.
• Give the credit to what earned it — once.

Your total will be lower than the platforms' combined figure. It will also match your bank account, which makes it the only number worth planning a budget around.

How Camorna does it

Camorna counts your sales from your own store's orders, so a sale counts once. On Pro, calls are tied to the ad that made the phone ring, so booked jobs are matched the same way.

Then it tells you the answer in a sentence rather than a dashboard — including the uncomfortable ones, like an ad that is not paying for itself, or free posts that are outperforming the ads you pay for.