Why do Meta and Google both claim credit for the same sale?
The short answer
Both platforms use last-click, self-reported attribution inside their own walled garden, so if a customer saw your Meta ad and then searched your brand on Google before buying, both platforms will happily claim that sale as their own. Since iOS14, this got worse, pixel-based tracking alone loses 20-40% of purchase events, so even a single platform's numbers are incomplete without server-side tracking like Conversions API. Stop trusting any single platform's dashboard in isolation, use a blended view or a dedicated attribution layer instead.
A quick summary to orient you. The real value is below: the resources worth your time, from people who've actually done it, not us.
Here are the resources
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Why we picked it
Explains exactly why last-click, single-platform attribution double-counts sales across Meta and Google, and what a multi-touch model actually corrects for.
Why we picked it
An independent, side-by-side comparison of the major attribution platforms, useful for actually deciding between them instead of reading each vendor's own marketing page.
Why we picked it
A current, practical rundown of what actually broke with attribution post-iOS14 and the realistic fixes (server-side tracking, first-party data) rather than nostalgia for pixel-only tracking.
Why we picked it
Post-iOS14, CAPI is the difference between an ad account that learns and one that flatlines, and this is the canonical reference. Even if your developer implements it, you should understand server-side events and deduplication so you can tell whether it's set up right.
