Facebook Ads says you made 85 sales last month. Google Ads reports 60. Your WooCommerce dashboard shows 50 actual orders. You’ve checked the setup three times. Nothing’s broken. The numbers simply don’t match—and they never will. Facebook reports 30-40% higher ROAS than click-focused platforms by design (Top Draw Digital Marketing, 2025), while 31.5% of users block tracking pixels entirely (Statista, 2024). Every platform is working with incomplete, different data.
The question isn’t which platform is lying. None of them are. The question is why they disagree and what you can actually trust for decisions.
Why Every Platform Shows a Different Number
The discrepancy has two completely separate causes, and conflating them is what drives store owners into analysis paralysis. The first is attribution methodology—each platform measures different things on purpose. The second is data quality—each platform receives different event data because of browser-based tracking failures.
Problem 1: Attribution Methodology (By Design)
Facebook uses a 1-day view plus 7-day click attribution window by default. If someone sees your ad on Monday, never clicks it, then searches for your store and buys on Wednesday—Facebook claims that sale. Facebook’s view-through attribution inflates conversion numbers by 15-40% compared to click-only attribution (Top Draw Digital Marketing, 2025).
Google Ads uses click-date attribution with a 30-day window. A customer clicks your ad on Monday, browses, then buys on Friday. Google Ads records that conversion on Monday (the click date), not Friday (the purchase date). GA4, meanwhile, uses event-date attribution—recording it on Friday. Same sale, different dates, different reports.
WooCommerce counts completed orders. Period. No attribution windows, no view-through credit, no statistical modeling. A sale happened or it didn’t.
These methodology differences are permanent. They’re features, not bugs. Google, Meta, and Amazon control 74% of global digital ad spend (eMarketer, 2025), and each operates as a walled garden with its own measurement rules.
You may be interested in: Facebook Ads vs GA4: Why Revenue Numbers Never Match (And What to Trust)
Problem 2: Data Quality (Fixable)
Here’s the thing. Before you can even evaluate attribution differences, you have a more fundamental problem: each platform receives different event data in the first place.
Ad blockers prevent GA4’s tracking script from loading for 31.5% of your visitors. Those same visitors might complete a purchase that WooCommerce records but GA4 never sees. Facebook’s pixel gets blocked too, but their Conversions API might capture some of those events—creating a third data set that matches neither GA4 nor WooCommerce.
More than 65% of Facebook conversions start on one device and are completed on another (Meta, 2025). Facebook can track this cross-device journey because users are logged in. GA4 attempts it through Google Signals but with limited coverage. WooCommerce sees only the final checkout device.
Safari’s 7-day cookie limit breaks attribution chains for both Google and Facebook, but impacts each differently based on their cookie implementation. Consent Mode affects platforms based on their specific integration. The result: three platforms, three different subsets of your actual visitor data, before attribution methodology even enters the picture.
The Self-Attribution Problem
There’s a structural incentive issue that makes reconciliation even harder. Every advertising platform is a self-attributing network—they grade their own homework.
Branch analyzed thousands of advertisers and found an average duplicate attribution rate of 18% across self-attributing networks (Branch, 2025). Without third-party deduplication, you’re paying for the same conversion across multiple platforms. Facebook claims it. Google claims it. Your WooCommerce database counted it once.
AdExchanger documented how platform over-attribution has become widespread: companies see Google, Meta, and Amazon all claiming credit for the same conversions, with self-reported ROAS climbing steadily while actual business performance stays flat (AdExchanger, 2024). The platforms aren’t necessarily lying—their attribution windows genuinely overlap, and each legitimately touched the customer. But adding their conversion counts produces a number that exceeds reality.
You may be interested in: The Marketing Pixel Death Spiral: Why Browser-Based Tracking Is Becoming Worthless in 2026
Your WooCommerce Database Is the Only Truth
Here’s the paradigm shift: stop trying to reconcile platform numbers with each other. Reconcile them against your WooCommerce database instead.
WooCommerce knows exactly how many orders you received, at what value, from which products. That’s your ground truth. A 20-30% discrepancy between GA4 and Google Ads is considered normal in the industry (Seresa Analysis, 2026). The goal isn’t matching platforms to each other—it’s understanding why each differs from your actual orders and using each platform’s data for what it does best.
Use WooCommerce for revenue truth and inventory decisions. Use Facebook Ads data to optimize creative and audiences—it’s excellent for understanding which ads resonate even if the conversion count is inflated. Use GA4 to understand on-site behavior, traffic patterns, and user journeys. Use Google Ads data to manage bidding and keyword strategy.
The problem is that right now, the discrepancies mix methodology differences with data quality issues, making it impossible to know which is which.
Server-Side Tracking Separates the Two Problems
When all platforms receive identical event data from a single source—your server—discrepancies become transparent. Server-side tracking provides 95% data accuracy versus 60-80% for pixel-only implementations (Top Draw, 2025).
With server-side tracking, every completed WooCommerce order fires one event that gets formatted and sent to GA4, Facebook CAPI, Google Ads Enhanced Conversions, and any other platform simultaneously. Same event data, same timestamp, same transaction details. If Facebook still shows more conversions than Google after that, you know it’s purely their attribution methodology—not missing data.
Transmute Engine™ does exactly this for WordPress stores. It’s a dedicated Node.js server running first-party on your subdomain. The inPIPE WordPress plugin captures WooCommerce events and sends them to your Transmute Engine server, which formats and routes them to all platforms at once—from your own domain, bypassing ad blockers entirely.
Key Takeaways
- No platform is lying—Facebook, Google, and WooCommerce measure fundamentally different things using different attribution windows and methodologies
- Facebook shows 30-40% higher ROAS by design because view-through attribution credits impressions, not just clicks (Top Draw, 2025)
- 31.5% of users block tracking pixels, meaning each platform sees a different subset of your visitors before attribution even starts
- Your WooCommerce database is your source of truth—it counts actual completed orders without attribution models or tracking gaps
- Server-side tracking solves the data quality problem by sending identical events to all platforms, making remaining discrepancies purely about methodology
Trust your WooCommerce database for actual order counts and revenue — it records completed transactions regardless of tracking limitations. Use Facebook Ads data to optimize ad creative and audience targeting. Use GA4 to understand on-site behavior and traffic patterns. No single platform gives the complete picture, but WooCommerce is your ground truth for what actually happened.
Facebook uses a 1-day view plus 7-day click attribution window by default, meaning it claims credit for purchases made by people who merely saw your ad without clicking. Google Analytics uses last-click attribution, only crediting the final touchpoint before conversion. Facebook also tracks across devices using logged-in user IDs, capturing cross-device conversions that GA4 misses. These methodology differences alone account for 15-40% higher conversion counts in Facebook.
Yes. Analytics professionals consider a 20-30% discrepancy between GA4 and Google Ads normal due to different counting methods, attribution windows, and conversion date recording. Larger discrepancies — above 40% — typically indicate tracking implementation issues rather than just methodology differences.
Server-side tracking ensures all platforms receive identical event data from a single source — your server. This eliminates data quality differences caused by ad blockers, browser restrictions, and consent timing. Discrepancies still exist because platforms use different attribution models, but you can identify whether gaps come from methodology or missing data.
Stop staring at three dashboards hoping the numbers match. See how WordPress-native server-side tracking creates a single source of truth at seresa.io.
