Imagine you’ve just finished a Christmas appeal running across Meta Ads and Google Ads. You open the ad platforms, Google Analytics and your CRM to report back to your boss, and the numbers are telling completely different stories.
Meta says the campaign generated £28,000. Google Analytics says £35,000. Your CRM says £40,000. Your director of fundraising needs a single figure for the board report by Friday.
It’s one of the most common frustrations in charity digital marketing – and it rarely has a simple explanation. But understanding why the numbers differ, and knowing which source to trust for which purpose, makes the whole picture far more manageable.
Every platform counts conversions differently
The root of the problem is that each platform logs a conversion according to its own rules, and those rules often don’t align with one another.
Google Ads
Google Ads attributes a conversion when someone clicks an ad and later donates, but also takes partial or full credit for view-through and engaged-view conversions – cases where someone saw or interacted with an ad without clicking. It can only track what it can observe, so users who haven’t accepted cookies won’t show up at all.
First-party data – email addresses or offline conversion data from your CRM – can be connected to Google Ads to help recover some of these unobservable conversions.
Fractional attribution is also possible, meaning a single £20 donation might appear as £10 in your data.
Meta Ads
Meta credits both click-through and view-through conversions, but its default attribution windows tend to be broader than Google Analytics, meaning it will claim credit for conversions that happened days after someone saw an ad. This makes Meta results look stronger than Google’s in direct comparisons, which isn’t always a fair reflection of what each channel actually contributed.
As with Google, Meta can only observe conversions where cookies have been accepted. When it can’t observe a conversion, it affects not just reporting but the algorithm’s ability to optimise future delivery.
Google Analytics 4
GA4 captures what happens in an observable session, providing conversion data across key parameters – session source and medium, product type, and some path-to-conversion information in the advertising section. It tells you which source was present when the conversion took place, but it can’t reconstruct the full journey that led to that point.
If a user saw a Meta ad on Monday and searched for your charity on Thursday, GA4 credits search. It may find some of those Meta Ad clicks when running Data-Driven Attribution. If cookies weren’t accepted, the session may still be logged as direct traffic with limited detail.
Your CRM
Your CRM logs every donation that completes on a specific funnel, attributing it to the one source code present at the point of conversion. It won’t tell you about the Meta ad someone saw three days earlier, but it will catch donations that the ad platforms missed entirely.
If you’re collecting “how did you hear about us?” data, it can provide useful supplementary attribution information that the platforms can’t. But these are self-reported outcomes, and donors aren’t always able to know whether they saw an ad, or what kind of ad it was (e.g. a YouTube ad on a TV screen).
Two scenarios that show why this matters
It helps to see these differences play out in practice.
Scenario 1 – the view-through overlap
A user sees a Meta ad but doesn’t click. They later search for your charity, click a Google Ad, accept cookies, browse your site and donate £20 through your general donation form.
| Platform | What it reports |
|---|---|
| Meta Ads | Claims full credit for £20 via view-through conversion |
| Google Ads | Claims full credit for £20 via click-through conversion |
| GA4 | Credits Google/CPC as the session source |
| CRM | Logs it as an unsolicited donation with no clear channel attribution |
You’ve potentially double-counted £20 of revenue across two platforms, while your CRM suggests neither deserves credit.
Scenario 2 – the invisible conversion
A user clicks a Meta ad, lands on a campaign-specific page, doesn’t accept cookies, but donates £20.
| Platform | What it reports |
|---|---|
| Meta Ads | Sees nothing – the conversion is invisible |
| Google Ads | Sees nothing – cookies were not accepted |
| GA4 | May catch a cookieless ping, but likely logs as direct traffic with UTMs lost |
| CRM | Records the full £20 against the Meta campaign funnel |
Only your CRM knows this conversion happened. This is why campaign-specific landing pages matter – if the same page is accessible via organic search or email, you lose this visibility entirely.
Five things that will improve your tracking and reporting
All this is frustrating for any marketer but there are things you can do to improve the picture.
1. Accept that discrepancies are normal
The goal isn’t to find one number that’s right – it’s to understand what each source is telling you and use them together. Think of it less like finding a single answer and more like piecing together a picture from multiple partial views.
2. Check your attribution windows in both platforms
Both Google Ads and Meta Ads allow you to configure how long after an impression or click a conversion is counted. Knowing what each platform is set to – and noting it down so it’s clear when reviewing results – makes comparisons far more meaningful.
3. Use platform data for optimisation, CRM data for reporting
Ad platform algorithms can only learn from conversions they can observe, so in-platform data remains important for decisions at the audience or ad set level.
For overall campaign performance – especially when reporting to leadership – CRM results give a more complete picture. You may need to hold both views simultaneously rather than choosing one.
4. Invest in server-side tracking
Reliance on third-party cookies is increasingly unreliable, particularly for charity audiences where cookie acceptance rates can be lower. Conversions API and server-side tracking help platforms observe conversions that would otherwise be invisible, improving both reporting accuracy and algorithmic optimisation. Enhanced conversions and CRM integrations can push further first-party data into the platforms to support this.
5. Build tracking into campaign planning from the start
Channel-specific landing pages, consistent UTM parameters, and a clear plan for how each source will be used to evaluate success should be agreed upon before a campaign launches – not reconstructed afterwards.
Why this matters more for charities than commercial advertisers
Misreading attribution isn’t just a reporting inconvenience; it can lead to real decisions about where to invest limited budgets. If Meta appears to be generating twice the return of Google because its attribution window is broader, and you shift budget accordingly, you may be optimising based on noise rather than signal. For charities where every pound of media spend needs to be justified, that’s a meaningful risk.
The aim isn’t one perfect number from one platform – that doesn’t exist. It’s about building enough understanding of each source’s strengths and limitations that you can make confident decisions, explain discrepancies clearly when they come up, and avoid being caught out when a trustee asks why the numbers don’t add up.
We can help build a clearer picture
Our team has deep experience in implementing and reviewing tracking, and creating attribution methodologies, and in advising on and implementing other technical best practices for charities.
What’s more, we can help you work out how to drive more conversions and make the most of the conversion data you get.
If you’d like help reviewing your tracking setup or building an attribution approach that works across your channels, we’re happy to take a look.
Drop us an email to find out more.
