Credit every
sale once.
Meta, Google, and GA4 each claim your conversions under their own windows and rules, so their dashboards never agree with each other or with your backend. Zappush records the journey on one persistent identity, credits each sale once, and shows you the full path that earned it.
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Your backend
1 order · $86Meta Ads Manager
7-day click window
Google Ads
30-day click window
GA4
90-day lookback
- 7 vs 30 vs 90 days
- the default attribution windows on Meta, Google Ads, and GA4, one reason the numbers never match
- 1 credit per sale
- each platform receives one deduplicated conversion, keyed to a shared event ID
- ~400 days
- identity lifetime on a server-set first-party cookie, so long journeys stay connected
Each platform counts the same sale under its own rules.
A conversion is credited to a Meta ad up to 7 days after a click, or one day after a mere impression. Google Ads defaults to 30 days and can be set anywhere from 1 to 90. GA4 looks back 90 days for most key events. Nobody is lying: each platform is answering a different question, inside a window it chose.
View-through counting widens the gap. An ad someone saw but never clicked can claim the order, and Google's own documentation notes that lengthening the view-through window usually increases the conversions recorded. Since no platform sees the others' claims, the same $86 order shows up in three dashboards, and your summed reports exceed the revenue your store actually took.
| Platform | Click window | View window | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meta | 7-day (or 1-day) | 1-day view, 1-day engaged-view | No 28-day option any more |
| Google Ads | 30-day default, configurable 1 to 90 | 1-day default, up to 30; engaged-view 3-day | Longer view windows record more conversions, per Google's own docs |
| GA4 | 90-day lookback default (30/60 available) | Acquisition events: 30-day default | Different windows than Google Ads, same company |
Google removed the models you used to compare against.
What happened
First click, linear, time decay, and position-based are gone. GA4 removed all four rule-based models in November 2023. Google Ads now offers only data-driven and last click, and conversion actions on the old models were migrated automatically.
Data-driven attribution is a model you cannot inspect. It compares the paths of converting and non-converting customers using machine learning on your account's click data. It may be a fine model, but it only sees Google's own touches, and you cannot audit its weighting.
What it means for you
First-click truth now only exists in your own data. If you want to know which channel starts journeys, no platform will tell you any more. A journey record you own, built on persistent identity, is the only place the question can still be answered.
Cross-platform paths were never visible to any of them. Meta cannot see the Google click, and Google cannot see the Meta view. Only a record that captures every touch on one identity can hold the whole path.
How it works
Capture every touch on one identity
Zappush assigns a persistent ID on the first anonymous visit and records each click, view, and session server-side against it. The identity lives in a server-set first-party cookie that lasts up to ~400 days, so the journey does not reset after Safari's 7-day cap.
Stitch touches into the real journey
Anonymous sessions backfill to the known profile at checkout, matched on hashed email and order ID. Every session, device, and channel that touched the buyer joins one ordered path from first touch to conversion.
Credit the sale once
The order is matched deterministically to the touches that earned it, by exact identifiers, not probabilistic modelling. Credit is split across the path, and each platform receives one deduplicated conversion keyed to a shared event ID instead of three overlapping claims.
One honest limit: attribution assigns credit among the touches it can observe. It tells you which ads participated in a sale, not what would have happened without them. For that you run incrementality tests; good attribution makes those tests easier to design, not unnecessary.
Questions, answered.
- Why don't my ad platform dashboards add up to my real sales?
- Because Meta, Google, and TikTok each claim the same conversion under their own attribution windows, with no one coordinating credit. Summed, they overstate real revenue by 20, 100%. Zappush credits each sale once on a single source of truth and sends each platform one deduplicated event via a shared event_id.
- How is this attribution different from last-click?
- Last-click gives all credit to the final touch and hides the awareness and consideration ads that created demand. Zappush uses multi-touch attribution on the full journey, distributing contribution across every touch while still resolving last-click credit for platform feedback when you want it.
- Does the attribution break when cookies expire?
- No. Zappush records touches server-side against a persistent identity in an HTTP server-set first-party cookie that persists up to ~400 days, so journeys longer than Safari ITP's 7-day cap stay intact instead of collapsing to "direct."
See what your journeys actually look like.
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From $59/month · 14-day free trial · Cancel anytime