Why your platform-reported conversions exceed your actual orders

Add up the conversions your ad platforms report and the total will usually exceed the orders in your commerce backend. Sometimes by a little. Often by a lot. This is not fraud, and it is not a bug in any one platform — it is the arithmetic of letting every channel mark its own homework.

Each platform claims what it can see

A platform attributes a conversion when it can connect an outcome to an impression or click it served, within an attribution window it chooses. A buyer who saw a social ad on Monday, searched on Wednesday and bought on Thursday is legitimately claimable by both channels under their own rules.

Neither platform is lying. Neither can see the other. Summing their outputs assumes an exclusivity that was never claimed.

Why the gap widens with more channels

The overlap grows faster than the channel count, because every additional channel can claim conversions already claimed by all the others. This is why the problem tends to appear precisely when a brand starts doing well enough to run everywhere.

What reconciliation actually requires

Three things, in this order:

• —A single source of truth for outcomes — the commerce or CRM system, not any ad platform.
• —One normalised model of spend and outcome, so a conversion can be assigned once.
• —Honest labelling: observed figures carry a source and timestamp, modelled figures are marked as modelled, and the two are never summed into one number.

The organisational half of the problem

The measurement fix is tractable. The harder part is that channel owners are usually rewarded on the inflated number, so reconciliation reads as a demotion. A unified layer only holds if the people running the channels are measured on the reconciled figure too.