You Ask, I Answer: Discrepancies Between Facebook and Google Analytics?

In today's episode, Enoch asks, why do I see such huge discrepancies between Facebook ads and Google Analytics? Facebook says my ad got 451 clicks, and Google says the corresponding landing page got 58 clicks from Facebook. What's going on? Huh? This is um a very common question, it's a very common situation uh people have with uh reporting systems from different vendors.

It's one of the reasons why analytics is so challenging for marketers, because these systems measure things sometimes in very different ways. Now, in this case, there's clearly something wrong when you have a essentially what's almost a 10x difference between uh one system and the other. And there's a four reasons probably that this would be happening. Uh number one uh Facebook ads are notorious for losing tracking codes. When you put on your UTM tracking code, sometimes Facebook just eats them, uh never displays them properly, etc.

Uh the antidote for that, by the way, is to use a link shortener in the ad itself. So uh using like Bitly or something to shorten your fully encoded link and put that as the destination link in Facebook so that Facebook can't overwrite those URL tracking codes. It's uh a common best practice. So there's uh that is one of the things is configuration issues. Um there is the very, very uh non-zero possibility that your ads are attracting bot clicks or non-human clicks or click farms, essentially fraudulent uh clicks.

Facebook, unlike Google ads, to my knowledge, does not publish any data about uh percentage of fraudulent clicks, but we do know from news releases that Facebook has been deleting uh literally billions of accounts uh for being bots and fraudulent and farms and and such like that. So there's a good possibility that uh some of those clicks that you're seeing the discrepancy is from non-human uh non-valid clicks. Let's call them that. Uh another possibility is that uh you have filtering on turned on in Google Analytics in some way that is masking or deleting the data that is coming in. You'd have to check your filters to be sure that there's that's not set up uh incorrectly.

Um there's the possibility that there is no attribution data being passed along at all. So that's where uh the UTM tracking codes are getting lost, and uh depending on your audience and the browser they're using, uh UTM tracking codes uh may not work correctly. Uh there may be uh URL attributes either in the ad itself or on Facebook that is essentially stripping where the traffic came from. Uh this is called the no referrer attribute, and it's really something kind of uh uh obnoxious that that companies do if they use that attribute uh it is essentially saying don't pass any referring information on to the destination site. Um the fourth and final possibility is somebody's lying.

Um somebody one of these ad systems is not telling the truth. The uh there each of these companies has an incentive to make its own metrics look better, and by definition, uh therefore they have an incentive to make other ad systems look not as good. And the reason for this is pretty straightforward. It's who gets your ad dollars. Where do you spend your money?

Where do you get results from? So I would go through and check very clearly your Google Analytics setup to make sure that it is bringing in data as accurately as possible. I would go through and check your Facebook ads to make sure they are all set up as correctly as possible. Make sure that you are hard coding uh your UTM tracking codes to ensure that they are showing up correctly in uh in Google Analytics, regardless of uh where they come from to make sure that uh it's all set up properly, and then if the discrepancy continues, if you're still seeing you know 5x or 10x discrepancies, the thing to look at is in Google Analytics, if you assume you have goals and goal completion set up, is Facebook as a traffic source converting? Now, even if you know in this example, if Facebook says you said it sent 451 clicks and Google says it sent fifty-eight, and fifty-six of those convert, guess what?

That's probably okay. You know, Facebook as a traffic source is okay, even if the the metrics are wonky because you're getting to your actual business impact. If on the other hand, uh Facebook says it's sending a million people to your site, and Google's saying okay, it's you send a hundred thousand people to site and one person converts. Doesn't matter which system is right or wrong, it's just not converting, right? It's it's not good traffic, regardless.

So that's that's the challenge there. Now, one of the tricky problems here is that when you have these massive discrepancies, your return on ad spend calculations are going to be off pretty wildly. Um 10x off in this case. In this instance, in terms of your return on ad spend, uh, because Facebook's gonna give you all sorts of crazy metrics like view throughs and stuff, uh, I would use the measurement system that is closest to the bottom of the funnel. Um so if for if for you that is Google Analytics rather than Facebook, so be it.

Then that's the system that you choose. Generally speaking, as a rule of thumb, measure c as close to the bottom of the funnel as possible so that uh from an operations perspective, you have a sense of which systems are working better or worse. So that's uh the answer to this question. Again, Facebook ads, uh, I have talked to a number of folks who run them, uh, who do Facebook ads professionally. Facebook is notorious for losing your data um and then sort of almost forcing you to rely on their uh ads as at least that seems to be their intent.

Uh whether that's true or not, I don't know, but that is definitely what people's experience has been. So uh take that into consideration that Google Analytics may be giving you better data. Uh as always, uh if you have follow-up questions, leave them in the box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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