Attribution windows: your network and your ad platform disagree by 40% and both are wrong

Reconciled three months of conversions between my tracker, the network dashboard and the ad platform.

Network said 4,112 conversions. Ad platform said 5,790. My tracker said 4,480.

None of them are lying. They are counting different events over different windows with different dedup rules. The ad platform counts a 7-day view-through; the network counts a 24-hour post-click. If you optimise to the ad platform's number you will scale something that is not making money.

Pick one source of truth, make it your tracker, and treat everything else as directional.

This should be stickied in every affiliate forum on the internet. The 40% gap bankrupts people who think it is fraud.

Do you reconcile automatically or by hand? Doing this monthly by hand sounds miserable.

Automated daily pull into a sheet now. First three months were by hand and it was exactly as miserable as it sounds.

Server-side tracking fixed about half of this for me. The other half is genuinely just different definitions.

Been doing this for three months. Can confirm it is slower and more boring than it sounds.

Respect for posting the losses as well as the wins.

Subbed. Please keep updating this instead of vanishing like every other journey thread.