A growth chart trending upward, representing the inflated numbers stacked attribution dashboards produce

Meta and Google each claimed some. The affiliate dashboard claimed some more. They all added up to about 130% of actual orders that left the warehouse.

Every platform was telling the truth as it saw it but together they sold me the same conversions twice.

Each ad platform scores its own contribution using its own attribution model and nothing else. A buyer sees a Meta ad Monday, clicks a Google ad Wednesday, comes through an affiliate link Friday, and all three log the sale. None of them know about the other two and none of them are built to.

So the dashboards overcount. Stack them and you clear 100% of your real sales, sometimes by a wide margin.

And that’s before the settings you picked without thinking of them as choices. The conversion window is one. Move it from 7 days to 30 and your channel mix shifts, same buyers, different story.

The honest version of attribution is one source of truth that every channel reconciles against, plus a holdout when the budget’s big enough to bother. Turn a channel off in a few markets. Watch what sales do. That gap is the closest thing to cause and effect you’ll get, and it usually comes in under what the dashboard promised.

Most budget meetings run on the summed-up version anyway. Someone’s moving next quarter’s money around based on platforms that each marked their own homework and graded easy.

I still pull the reports. I just tell whoever’s reading them which numbers we measured and which ones we modeled, and I keep the holdout on the same page.