Here’s a myth that you might believe regarding Ads Manager overreporting.
Honestly, I believed it forever. Here’s the situation…
You have a purchase event that fires on page load. Someone clicks your ad and makes a purchase on your website. After they complete the purchase, they refresh the confirmation page three times.
Will Ads Manager report four conversionsA conversion is counted whenever a website visitor performs an action that fires a standard event, custom event, or custom conversion. Examples of conversions include purchases, leads, content views, add to cart, and registrations. More because the page was loaded four times?
Many people believe it will. It’s a myth.
Meta’s Documentation
From Meta’s documentation about deduplication, there’s a table with the question, “Are events deduplicated or not?”
For Ads Manager and Ads Reporting, it reads:
Events are deduplicated. For example, if we receive an event multiple times over a short period for one person, we may keep one and discard the rest to avoid overcounting.
This is different from the raw reporting that you see in Event Sources Reporting in Events Manager. In that case, those events are NOT deduplicated.
But again, they are deduplicated in Ads Manager and Ads Reporting. So, if you’ve long believed that your results can be overreported by someone simply refreshing the confirmation page, you’re going to need to find a new source to blame.
The Mystery
What we don’t know is how close together events need to be for Meta to discard them. A minute? An hour? A day? We don’t know.
But still, it’s helpful to see this in writing to know that this deduplication happens.
Check out the blog post I wrote on deduplication and the various sources here.
