Ad measurement for e-commerce
In short
Ad measurement is working out what an ad actually caused. Platforms report what they can see, which is clicks and a pixel firing — not your margin, not your returns, and not whether the customer came back. Everything below starts from store data and treats the platform's number as a claim to be checked.
Every article in this cluster shares one assumption: the number in the ad platform is a claim made by an interested party, and the store is the record. That is not a conspiracy theory about attribution — platforms genuinely cannot see cost of goods, refunds or repeat purchases, so they report the only thing they have.
What an ad cost, and what the customer it bought went on to be worth — measured on store data, not platform data.
What this covers
- 01The ROAS below which you are losing moneyRead
- 02Whether a campaign made money, not just revenueRead
- 03What to subtract before calling something profitRead
Every article in this cluster
Common questions
Why does Meta report more purchases than my store?
Several causes stack: view-through attribution counts people who never clicked, the attribution window credits conversions that happened days later, modelled conversions fill gaps left by consent refusals, and the same order can be claimed by two platforms at once. None of them is a bug. They are reporting choices, and they all push in the same direction.
Which number should I report to a client?
The store's, with the platform's alongside it and the gap named. A report that quietly picks the flattering number is one reconciliation away from an uncomfortable meeting.
Is last-click attribution good enough?
For deciding whether to keep a campaign running, often yes. For deciding how much to spend, no — last-click systematically underprices anything that opens a relationship rather than closing one.
See it on your data
Loyalz joins ad spend to settled order lines, so the numbers in these articles are columns rather than a spreadsheet you rebuild every month.
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