What Meta claims, and what the data can stand behind

A new report at Analytics → Advertising. It puts Meta's reported ROAS beside a number built only from orders we can prove came from a Facebook ad click, and explains the difference.

Ad platforms report their own contribution, and every platform takes full credit for every conversion it touched. Meta's default counts a purchase up to seven days after a click and one day after a mere view, and fills the gaps it cannot observe with modelled estimates. On one live store over thirty days, Meta claimed more conversion value than the store took in revenue — including subscription renewals no advertisement drove.

Added

• The claim beside the floor. Meta's ROAS and a click-only ROAS over the same spend. The second is deliberately conservative: it counts only orders carrying a real Facebook click identifier, so the true figure sits between the two.
• Where the gap comes from, as arithmetic against your own books — how many more conversions Meta claims than you had orders, and what share of your total revenue its claim represents.
• What the evidence supports, tier by tier, with unattributed revenue shown at full size as its own line. We never spread unknown revenue across channels; that is what makes a platform number look better than it is.
• A per-campaign table, Meta's claim next to ours. Campaigns we cannot measure show a dash and an unmatched badge — not a zero. "We could not measure this" and "this sold nothing" are different statements, and only one of them is true.
• Coverage, stated plainly. Every figure carries the share of orders and spend it rests on.

Notes

• Campaign-level figures depend on an ad's destination naming the product it sells. Ads landing on a product page, or on a product-named domain, are matched automatically; the rest are reported as unmatched rather than guessed at.
• Subscription renewals inherit the attribution of the order that acquired them. Renewals whose acquisition predates click-id capture stay unattributed, and the report says so instead of showing a zero.