If you’re just starting out then this doesn’t really apply.
This is only if you’re scaling on one of the major platforms.
It’s in the interest of each of the platforms to attribute more of the sales to them than is actually the case.
That’s why it’s very important that you actually validate the numbers you’re seeing in your Google or Facebook dashboard.
If you’re primarily running just one of these online advertising channels, then it’s pretty easy to validate.
You just check how many opt-ins, sales or check whatever metric is important for you and see whether the numbers Facebook/Google is giving you matches up to what you have internally.
The other thing is never to rely on one day’s data since it will almost always change because of misattribution or delayed attribution.
Of course, this gets a bit more complicated if you have multiple sources and they’re all trying to get credit for the same sales.
That’s where having a custom reporting dashboard will be important. You can use something like Segmetrics with Data Studio. You can feed data back into your advertising platform so that you can better adjust your campaigns in real time.
I’ve heard people that run large ad accounts that they know Facebook/Google reporting is inaccurate but it stays consistently inaccurate so it means that increases in sale will still be properly reflected. The major issue with this is that you may end up turning off campaigns that are actually profitable and leaving campaigns that are actually profitable on.
The bottom line is that you should always validate the data you get from your advertising platforms and be skeptical of the numbers that you see, even from Google Analytics.