Ads
Reading the Ads screen — spend, attributed revenue, and what to check when a number looks wrong.
The Ads screen brings your ad spend and the sales it produced into one place, down to the individual ad where the data allows.
Where the spend comes from
Two sources, added together.
Connected accounts. Once Meta or Google is connected, spend comes straight from the platform and updates itself.
Anything you add by hand. Useful for platforms that are not connected, or spend that never appears in an ad account at all.
The same total is used everywhere: on this screen, in your Profit and Loss, in the weekly digest, and by Aplo. If you connect an ad account, that spend counts against your profit automatically.
Spend in a different currency
If your ad account bills in a different currency from the one your store reports in, we convert it and tell you we have, using the rate from the end of the period you are viewing.
If no rate is available, that spend is marked unknown rather than guessed at, which will also hold up your net profit until it can be priced.
Attributed revenue
Attributed revenue is the sales we can trace back to an ad, using the Aplon pixel on your storefront.
It will usually be lower than the revenue the ad platform reports for the same campaign. That is expected, and it is not a fault in either system. Meta and Google count a sale as theirs if the shopper saw or clicked an ad within their attribution window, even if the shopper arrived by another route. We count what we can actually follow through to the order.
If the two agreed exactly, one of them would be making it up.
Ad spend showing but no attributed revenue
Almost always the pixel. Check that it is installed and collecting on Settings. Without it we can see what you spent but not what it did.
The other common cause is that the ad's link does not carry campaign tags, so we cannot tell which campaign a visit belongs to. The screen flags ads where the tags are missing.
Changing budgets
Where an account is connected, you can adjust budgets from here without going into the platform. Changes are recorded, so there is a history of what was changed and when.
Related
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