Reconciliation, in marketing analytics, is the regular check of the conversions and revenue reported by GA4 and ad platforms against the real orders, enquiries and payments in your own records. It tells you how far the reported figures can be trusted, and it catches broken tracking before it misleads spending decisions.
How reconciliation works
Choose a period, usually a calendar month, and pull the same measure from every place it is recorded: orders and sales from your shop platform or accounts software, enquiries from your CRM or inbox, purchases and key events from GA4, and conversions from Google Ads and Meta. Put them side by side in one table.
Then explain the differences. Some are expected and fairly stable:
- Visitors who decline cookies or use ad blockers never reach GA4 or the advertising pixels.
- Ad platforms count conversions against the date of the ad click or view, within their attribution window, while your shop counts by order date.
- Each platform claims every sale it touched, so platform-reported conversions from Google and Meta together often add up to more sales than you made.
- VAT, delivery, discounts and refunds may be treated differently in each system.
- Time zones differ if a property or ad account was not set to London.
Other differences are faults: duplicated purchases from a confirmation page that reloads, staff test orders, a tag removed during a website update, or a payment provider taking credit as a referral. Matching records by transaction ID is the quickest way to tell which is which, because you can list the order numbers that appear in one system and are missing from the other.
Why it matters
The bidding systems in Google Ads and Meta optimise towards the conversions they are told about. If tracking silently doubles purchases, they chase cheap duplicates; if it loses half the enquiries, they hold back on campaigns that are working. Reconciliation is how you find out before a quarter’s budget has followed the error.
It also sets realistic expectations. Under UK consent rules, some buyers will always be missing from browser-based tracking. Knowing your own typical gap, measured rather than assumed, lets you judge campaigns against real sales instead of debating why the platforms disagree. I go through the most common reasons in why GA4 and Facebook conversion numbers do not match.
Common mistakes
- Expecting the numbers to match exactly, then losing faith in all of them when they do not.
- Adding up conversions from every platform and treating the total as real sales.
- Reconciling once at setup, so a break months later goes unnoticed.
- Comparing unlike figures, such as VAT-inclusive GA4 revenue against net sales from your accounts, or a seven-day click window against calendar-month orders.
- Checking totals only. Missing orders and duplicates can cancel each other out and hide two separate problems.
How to act on it
Choose a source of truth for each outcome: usually the shop platform for orders and revenue, and the CRM for leads. Build a simple monthly table with that figure first and each platform’s figure beside it, expressed as a percentage of the real number. Track the percentages over time. A steady ratio is fine; a sudden change is the signal to investigate.
Agree the definitions once (VAT, delivery, refunds, time zone) and write them at the top of the table. Monthly reconciliation is a fixed part of how I report in performance marketing, and it is usually the first thing I ask to see when reviewing an account someone else has been running.