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Data mismatch for PPC and Social Media
Data mismatch for PPC and Social Media
Sam S avatar
Written by Sam S
Updated over a week ago

Oftentimes, you might be wondering why your PPC/Social Media dashboards do not match with the data that you see in ReportGarden.

Following are a few basic checks that we find are responsible for the data mismatch

  • Make sure that you choose the right account. It is oftentimes confusing in Google Analytics or Facebook Pages where you have accounts with similar account names

  • Make sure that you choose the right date range. For eg, when dealing with weekly reports, Sunday-Saturday vs Monday-Sunday would lead to a significant difference in the data

  • Make sure that there are no filters applied. You can view them in the advanced tab of the widget editor

  • Make sure that you sort the data in the right order and with the right metric

  • Check if the campaign/ad-group/ad that you are reporting on are enabled in your PPC account. It is easy to miss paused/deleted campaign data on your account management dashboards

More reasons as to why the data might not be matching are as follows

Google Adwords

  • Reporting on custom audiences: Google API has limitations on data retrieval with respect to custom audiences. The API does not support retrieval of custom intent audiences

  • Auction Insights: Google Ads API does not support reporting on auction insights yet. If you want to track competitor rankings, we recommend you use our SEO feature

Google Analytics

In very large volumes of data, there can be a slight discrepancy between the numbers you see on Google Analytics dashboards vs the numbers you see on ReportGarden. This is because the APIs work via sampling. You can read more about sampling here

Facebook Ads

  • Attribution Window - In case of data mismatch in Facebook Ads, please double check if the right attribution window is selected for reporting. ReportGarden provides several attribution windows, and gives an option to choose to combine data across attribution windows for views and clicks

  • In many cases, there would be a mismatch for the estimated ad recall rate and estimated ad recallers. API doesn't return the correct values all the time. According to the Facebook API, these metrics are still in "development" and are "estimates". ReportGarden has tried to derive those metrics. The calculation goes as "Estimated Ad Recallers" x 100 / Reach. But as everyone is aware, similar to reach, estimated ad recallers cannot be aggregated, which is why the discrepancy in the numbers is not fixable.

    Facebook Insights

  • For Facebook Pages where the traffic is negligible, the API does not return us any data. You might know that there is some activity, but the business manager and ReportGarden widgets would return zero data as the API needs a minimum threshold of traffic and activity on the pages to start reporting the data

Twitter Insights

  • Data can only be obtained from the day you have connected them with ReportGarden. ReportGarden does not have access to fetch historical data for these APIs, and we are constrained by these limitations.

  • Your account token might become invalid, which might be due to several reasons like change of password, removal of ReportGarden in the list of authorized apps, or for security reasons where Twitter might reset your credentials. In that scenario, we would recommend you immediately respond to the email sent out by ReportGarden and relink your account to avoid loss of data

    The historic data for some of the metrics differ. The details are mentioned below.
    1. Time dimension. Favourites Count, Listed Count, Followers Count, Status Count, Friends Count => Data available from the day of linking the account. We won't have data for the days the account token is not active.

    2. We have a look-back window to gather the activities for a given tweet. In rare scenarios, we might encounter cases where there is activity on the tweet well past its lifetime. If case of any discrepancy with respect to the tweet engagement metrics, do shoot us an email and we’ll sync the data right away.

Twitter Ads

  • One of the most common issues related to data mismatch of Twitter Ads Reporting is choosing the right placement type. You can select the placement type as Twitter Publisher Network or Twitter or Both from the advanced section

Instagram Analytics

  • Data can only be obtained from the day you have connected them with ReportGarden. ReportGarden does not have access to fetch historical data for these APIs, and we are constrained by these limitations.

  • Your account token might become invalid, which might be due to several reasons like change of password, removal of ReportGarden in the list of authorized apps or for security reasons where Instagram might reset your credentials. In that scenario, we would recommend you to immediately respond to the email sent out by ReportGarden and relink your account to avoid loss of data

    The historic data for some of the metrics differ. The details are mentioned below.

    1. Follower Count -=> 30 days before linking the account.
    2. Email Contact, Get Direction Clicks, Impressions, Phone Call Clicks, Profile Views, Reach, Text Message Clicks Website Clicks => 30 days before the day of linking
    3. Media, Posts => Last 365 days. No data lost if refreshed
    4. Stories => From the day of linking. Not available on the days account is inactive 5. Total Follower Count => From the day we link the account. We can estimate data for the last 30 days, but may/may not be accurate
    6. Total Follows Count, Follows Count => From the day account is linked. We wont have data for the days account token is not active

LinkedIn Company Pages

  • Data can only be obtained from the day you have connected them with ReportGarden. ReportGarden does not have access to fetch historical data for these APIs, and we are constrained by these limitations.

  • Your account token might become invalid, which might be due to several reasons like change of password, removal of ReportGarden in the list of authorized apps or for security reasons where LinkedIn might reset your credentials. In that scenario, we would recommend you to immediately respond to the email sent out by ReportGarden and relink your account to avoid loss of data

    The historic data for some of the metrics differ. The details are mentioned below.

    1. Time, Overview Dimension - Clicks, New Engagement, Likes, Comments, Shares, Impressions, Unique Impressions, Paid Follower Gain, Organic Follower Gain, Total Follower Gain => Last 1 year. Can fetch this data on refresh
    2. All demographic dimensions and measures => Only from the day of linking. Cannot refetch if the token is refreshed
    3. Posts/Updates Dimension => All-time, can refetch the data on token refresh

Demographic data

When dealing with dimensions like Age and Gender, or segmentation for Age/Gender, the cumulative results from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc might not add up to what you see on an account and a campaign level overview. This is a limitation from the APIs itself

You can find more in the documentation here

Google Analytics metrics with PPC data - Depending on how the accounts are setup, metrics like revenue, ROAS, goals are mapped to the corresponding PPC account (Adwords, Facebook, etc).

Please note that ReportGarden is not responsible for matching GA data with the corresponding PPC data. ReportGarden is constrained by the data that the API returns, and we can troubleshoot the issue if the number appearing on Google Analytics dashboard is not matching with the corresponding metric in ReportGarden widgets. Any other data issues are out of scope for ReportGarden to troubleshoot, we recommend you to contact your PPC account manager.

If you still find that there is a data mismatch, please shoot an email to [email protected]

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