The Ecomm Analyst

Most operators I work with have run into this. Meta Ads Manager says the campaign drove $48k last month. Shopify says the store did $52k total across all channels. Even if everything else went dark, Meta’s number can’t be right.

It is right, by Meta’s definition. That’s the problem.

Meta’s default attribution window is 7-day click and 1-day view. Anyone who clicked an ad in the last week, or saw an ad yesterday, then converted, gets counted. Most of those people would have converted anyway. They were already in remarketing audiences because they were already on the site.

This isn’t fraud or even really overreporting inside Meta’s framework. Meta is honestly telling you who touched an ad and then bought. It just happens to overlap heavily with what every other platform also claims.

I had a store last quarter doing roughly $60k a month [PLACEHOLDER: confirm number before publishing]. The channel-reported attribution from platforms summed to about 180% of actual Shopify revenue. Meta claimed around 50%. Klaviyo claimed around 40%. Google claimed around 30%. A long tail of organic and direct still showed up in Shopify’s own dashboard on top of all that.

The fix isn’t picking a winner. It’s running attribution independently of the ad platforms. I use ThoughtMetric for this. It pulls from server-side data and post-purchase survey responses, so the channel splits don’t depend on what each platform feels like claiming.

Three things worth checking when you reconcile.

How total platform-claimed revenue compares to actual Shopify revenue. If the ratio is over 1.5x, every channel CAC you’re working with is overstated.

New customer revenue split by first-touch channel. This is where the actual acquisition story lives, and the platforms don’t separate it well.

Subscriber-driven revenue separated from net new acquisition. Klaviyo flows close existing demand. They mostly aren’t building it. Mixing the two makes email look like a growth lever when it’s really a margin lever.

When platforms argue with each other, none of them are wrong on their own terms. All of them are wrong as a basis for budget decisions.