What Meta and Google do · and what to check on your own account
What Meta and Google do that quietly breaks your numbers, and the fix for each.
Not setup guides. Each note is one thing Meta or Google does that quietly makes an ad account's numbers wrong, what it looks like, and the fix. Written for whoever runs your tracking, so you can send them the link.
Three to ask about, one line each
- A customer moves an estimate. Your office says one booking. Ads Manager can say two, and the ads learn from the two.
- A customer books and cancels a minute later. Some setups still tell Facebook it was a booking, and the ads go looking for more people who cancel.
- A retry after an outage. Google can file your bookings on the day of the outage instead of the day they happened, so a good week looks bad.
Ask whoever runs your tracking what happens in each case. Every note below was found and fixed in our own system, on test data, before a client touched it.
For whoever runs your tracking
Why a moved appointment counts as two bookingsA moved appointment can count twice. The ads then learn that a no-show who rebooked is worth double.
What a retry can carry, and what it cannotA retry has no browser. Part of what Meta matches on goes with it, and the retry has to stop at 48 hours.
The cancelled booking you must never sendSome bookings must never go out. Send a cancelled one and the ads learn to buy people who cancel.
The opt-out that only stopped half of the trackingThe browser stops tracking. The server keeps sending the homeowner's details to Meta on every booking.
One dataset for every client, and why that is wrongOne dataset for every client and one company's ads learn from another company's customers.
A value sent in the wrong currencyA value in the wrong currency makes one visit look worth more than a decade of ad spend.
The click id in the wrong fieldGoogle has three kinds of click id. File one in the wrong field and Google accepts the upload while refusing the row.
The failure that looks like successGoogle can answer OK and still refuse your row. Read only the status and you record conversions that never landed.
The conversion filed on the wrong dayGoogle files a conversion on the date you tell it. A retry that sends the current time moves your bookings onto the day of the outage.