What Campaign Reports Can Still Show When Platform Dashboards Disagree
When Meta, Google, and your ad server each claim a different conversion total for the same flight, the reconciliation conversation often starts in the wrong place — with someone asking which number to believe.
Start with delivery logs
Platform dashboards apply their own attribution windows, view-through rules, and deduplication logic. Your ad server may count conversions differently again. Before comparing totals, export raw delivery logs with impression timestamps and match them against your conversion event stream keyed by user or session identifier where privacy rules allow.
Side-by-side, not blended
We produce charts that show each source's total on the same axis with definitional footnotes — not a single "true" number that hides the gaps. Finance may choose form completions as the primary KPI; marketing may prefer view-through assisted conversions for channel comparison. Both views appear in the report with their source named.
A recent FMCG example
For a Q4 brand campaign, the agency dashboard exceeded finance's branch-visit count by 34%. The gap narrowed to 8% once we removed duplicate conversions counted across a 28-day and a 7-day window on the same platform. The remaining difference was definitional, not a tracking error.