Why Meta and Google disagree on your sales, and what a press feature changes

In short

A business that runs Meta Ads and Google Ads can end up with two reports that do not match. Each platform claims the sales it counts.

This is not a fault in either tool. Each counts conversions by its own rules. Understanding those rules explains why budgets get cut from the wrong channel, and where press coverage fits.

How Meta decides a sale was its doing

Meta credits a conversion to an ad when the person interacted with it before buying. Historically, that included clicks of every kind: shares, saves and likes as well as link clicks.

On 3 March 2026 Meta announced a change for campaigns that optimise for website or in-store conversions. Click-through attribution will exclusively include link clicks. Conversions that follow shares, saves and other non-link actions move into engaged-view attribution, which Meta is renaming engage-through attribution.

Meta also shortened the video engaged-view window from 10 seconds to 5 seconds. It said the aim was to reduce the gap between Ads Manager and third-party tools such as Google Analytics. Reporting figures may shift as the update rolls out, Meta said, while billing is unchanged.

How Google divides credit between touchpoints

Google Ads uses data-driven attribution as the default for most conversion actions. Rather than giving everything to the last click, it distributes credit using the account's own past data for that conversion action.

Google Analytics describes the method in more detail. It uses machine learning on converting and non-converting paths and credits each interaction by how much it changes the estimated chance of a conversion. Google's worked example has a path at a 3% chance that falls to 2% without one ad exposure, so that exposure is credited with a 50% lift.

Last click is the alternative. In Analytics it gives 100% of the credit to a single channel, based on click order. Google Ads still supports last click, but its first click, linear, time decay and position-based models are no longer supported.

Why the two reports will not reconcile

Put the two sets of rules side by side and the mismatch is clear. Meta counts people who clicked on or engaged with an ad and later bought. Google credits the ad interactions on the path, and in Analytics, under the Google paid channels last click model, a path with no Google Ads click falls back to the paid and organic last click model.

A person can see a Meta ad on Monday, search the brand name on Thursday and buy through a Google ad. Meta may claim that sale on its view or engagement window. Google may claim it on the search click.

Meta itself says incrementality tests, such as Conversion Lift, are the gold standard in measurement. That is a useful signal: the platform that sells the ads says tests like these are the best way to answer that question.

The step before the search: the look-up

Between the Meta ad and the Google search, the buyer may look the business up. That step falls outside the ad interactions and channels that Google's attribution scores.

Google's attribution scores ad interactions and channels on the path. A magazine feature the buyer read on their phone is not among them. The click at the end is credited.

The practical risk is a wrong budget call. If Google shows brand searches converting well, and Meta shows a weak return on its last-click numbers, the obvious move is to cut Meta. That may shrink the pool of people who go on to search.

What a single team does differently

When three channels are bought from three suppliers, each supplier may be judged on its own report.

When one team runs all three, the question changes. It can ask whether Meta spend is raising the volume of searches, whether the people who search find something that earns their trust, and whether the Google budget is catching them. It can also treat the platform numbers as inputs, not verdicts, and use holdout style tests where the account is big enough to support them.

That is the arrangement at Blue Leopard Media, which runs Google Ads, Meta Ads, press features, websites and apps as one team. On Google Ads, it moves budget every week toward what brings in leads and sales, blocks wasteful searches, and sends a plain-English report every month covering what was spent, what it brought in and what changes next. Nothing goes live and nothing is spent until the client approves a written proposal, then an audit, then the client's approval.

Press features sit alongside that work as a separate service, priced from $249. The reason to buy them together is that the look-up step finally has something good to find.

What to ask before trusting any channel report

Ask which actions each platform counts, and over what window. Meta's change from all clicks to link clicks shows that these definitions move, so a month-on-month comparison across the change needs care.

Ask what the report cannot see. Ask whether it counts anything a buyer read before searching.

Ask who is responsible for the gap between channels. If the answer is nobody, the budget may follow whichever report looks best.