Your GA4, Google Ads, and Facebook Ads will never show the same conversion numbers—and that’s by design. Each platform measures conversions using completely different attribution windows, data sources, and philosophies. Meta credits a conversion if someone clicks within 7 days OR merely views an ad within 1 day. GA4 relies on sessions and its own data-driven attribution. Google Ads prioritizes its click data. They’re not broken. They’re competitors telling different stories about the same customer journey.

Understanding why they differ is the first step toward making better marketing decisions—and finding a single source of truth you can actually trust.

The Attribution Philosophy Problem

Every advertising platform wants credit for your conversions. That’s not cynicism—it’s their business model. When Facebook, Google, and your analytics tool each claim they drove a sale, at least two of them are overcounting.

Here’s how each platform thinks about a conversion:

Facebook Ads (Meta): Uses view-through and click-through attribution. If someone saw your ad and converted within 24 hours—even without clicking—Facebook claims credit. Click attribution extends to 7 days by default. This inflates conversion counts compared to click-only platforms.

Google Ads: Focuses primarily on click-based attribution. If someone clicked your ad and converted within 30 days (default window), Google Ads takes credit. It doesn’t see what happened on Facebook.

GA4: Attempts to track the full journey across channels but relies on client-side data that ad blockers and browser restrictions can destroy. GA4’s data-driven attribution model requires minimum thresholds most small stores don’t meet—meaning many sites fall back to last-click attribution anyway.

You may be interested in: WooCommerce Revenue vs Google Analytics: Why GA4 Is Always Wrong and How to Fix It

The Technical Data Loss Layer

Beyond attribution philosophy, there’s a harder problem: each platform receives different data quality.

31.5% of global users run ad blockers (Statista, 2024), blocking client-side tracking scripts entirely. Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention limits cookies to 7 days for third-party tracking. iOS App Tracking Transparency has devastated Facebook’s ability to match conversions to users.

GA4’s behavioral modeling attempts to fill gaps, but it requires 1,000+ daily events with analytics_storage denied for at least 7 days just to activate modeling (Google Analytics Help, 2025). Most WooCommerce stores don’t hit that threshold.

The result: GA4 shows a partial picture based on whoever your tracking scripts could see. Facebook shows conversions based on its pixel plus whatever you send via Conversions API. Google Ads shows its click-to-conversion data. None of them see your complete customer base.

Why Reconciliation Is the Wrong Goal

Store owners spend hours trying to make these numbers match. It’s wasted effort.

Numbers will never perfectly match between platforms—they operate on fundamentally different measurement philosophies (Digital MicroEnterprise, 2025). Facebook is measuring its ad impression influence. Google Ads is measuring its click influence. GA4 is trying to measure everything but missing data at every turn.

The real question isn’t “which platform is right?” It’s “what’s my actual conversion count, and how do I get that data to every platform consistently?”

Your WooCommerce database knows exactly how many orders you received. That’s your source of truth. The challenge is getting that authoritative data to your advertising platforms without relying on client-side scripts that get blocked.

You may be interested in: The One-to-Many Architecture: Replace 6 Tracking Plugins With One Data Stream

The Single Source of Truth: Server-Side Tracking

Here’s the paradigm shift: instead of each platform independently trying to track your visitors (and failing in different ways), you capture events once at your server and send them to all destinations.

Server-side tracking captures purchase events directly from WooCommerce—at the moment the order is created in your database. No browser. No ad blockers. No cookie restrictions. That event, with all its data (revenue, products, customer info), gets formatted and sent to GA4, Facebook CAPI, Google Ads, and wherever else you need it.

The platforms will still attribute differently—that’s their business model. But at least they’re all working from the same underlying event data. You know Facebook received the purchase. You know GA4 received it. The delta in their reporting is now purely attribution methodology, not data loss.

How Transmute Engine Creates Your Source of Truth

Transmute Engine™ is a first-party Node.js server that runs on your subdomain (like data.yourstore.com). Your WordPress site sends events via the lightweight inPIPE plugin to your Transmute Engine server—not through the browser. The server formats each event for every destination and sends them simultaneously.

GA4 Measurement Protocol. Facebook Conversions API. Google Ads Enhanced Conversions. BigQuery for your own data warehouse. One event, one source, multiple destinations.

You still won’t get matching numbers across platforms—their attribution models remain different. But you’ll know exactly what data each platform received. Discrepancies become methodology differences, not mysteries.

Key Takeaways

• GA4, Google Ads, and Facebook use fundamentally different attribution models—expecting matching numbers is unrealistic
• Facebook’s view-through attribution inflates numbers compared to click-only platforms by design
• 31.5% ad blocker usage plus Safari restrictions mean each platform sees a different subset of your visitors
• Your WooCommerce database is your source of truth—not any advertising platform’s dashboard
• Server-side tracking ensures all platforms receive the same event data, making discrepancies purely about attribution methodology

Ready to establish your single source of truth? See how Transmute Engine works.