Why Do My Facebook Sales Look So Low In Google Analytics

Google Analytics and Facebook advertising reports will show very different revenue results. This is because Facebook only monitors traffic it has sent to the site and then checks within x days to see if a sale has been made.  i.e. Facebook does not care who brought that visitor to the site either before or after the click from the Facebook advert – it just records it as a Facebook sale.

Google Analytics, on the other hand, tracks all referrers to the site and has to choose one of them to attribute the sale to ie. Facebook will be only one of the referrer in a multi-visit sale. Google Analytics will attribute the sale to the last click before the sale. So this could be SEO, Email, of PPC etc.  Any good PPC Agency in Manchester should be able to help you out with your attribution settings.

What’s more Google Analytics seems to be useless at tracking referrals from Facebook and often puts them into referral traffic.

If you are using Facebook for remarketing the results reported in Google Analytics will be very low but very high in Facebook reports.  For remarketing I would take the revenue generated and reduce by a factor of four and see if there is still ROI, as a lot of these sales may have come in anyway.  But for a site that has a long sales cycle e.g. expensive dresses then it makes sense to do remarketing on Facebook as people take time to purchase and need to think about it.  If you are selling something like ‘car parts’ then the transaction is usually done that day and so remarketing on facebook is less important.