With growing privacy restrictions over the years, tracking ad-attributed revenue has become increasingly difficult.

Yet, it's still essential—how else would you know if your ads are driving meaningful results? How can you effectively optimize and scale your campaigns?

The ideal solution is an attribution platform like Northbeam and Triple Whale. However, most individual brands don’t have the funds to support a platform like this.

So what do you do in the meantime?

Here are three options for tracking revenue attributable to ads that we use when we don’t have access to more robust software.

1. UTMs via Shopify (or your sales platform of choice). Take some time to set up UTMs on all of your paid ads. At the end of the month, compare what each campaign spent in their respective ads platforms and compare that to the amount of orders and revenue those campaigns generated according to UTMs in your website’s back end.

PROS:

• No additional software needed
• Easy to adjust and update UTM data as needed
• Ability to add granular details for campaign tracking

CONS:

• A lot of store platforms (especially Shopify) are notorious for stripping UTM data from referring links, so a lot of revenue ends up unattributed or misattributed
• The most restrictive and conservative of all three options
• Takes some time to organize and set up effective UTMs

2. GA4 data. A lot of brands default to GA4 as their attribution platform of choice. It’s free, and Google always talks about how great it is, right?

But did you know that the data in GA4 is not accurate and does not match the data in your online store?

If you don’t believe me, go and compare total sales over a given time period on your online store platform and GA4. You’ll notice that GA4 is missing a lot of data.

So why is this option on our list?

It can still provide valuable insight. For example. If your UTM data attributes 5 sales to a particular Facebook campaign, and GA4 attributes 10 sales, you know that more than likely, the actual number of sales is between 5-10. GA4 also tends to be more accurate for Google properties when compared to other methods outlined in this article.

Here’s a list of pro’s and con’s:

PROS:

• No additional software needed
• Widely-used platform, meaning there’s tons of free tutorials online
• Provides other data such as customer journey, etc.
• Easy to set up, and utilizes UTMs

CONS:

• Inaccurate data
• Takes some time to organize and set up effective UTMs

3. In-Platform Data. The third option relies on using data from an ad platform’s data analytics. Most all paid ads platforms will have some kind of data analytics section, and pre-iOS 14 we could rely on this data. In-platform data is not as accurate as it used to be, but can still give you a rough idea of what’s going on.

Here’s some pro’s and con’s:

PROS:

• No UTMs required
• Does not require the use of a third platform

CONS:

• Need to set up tracking on your website (can be difficult depending on your platform)
• Inaccurate data and very liberal with the sales it claims

So…which is best?

The reality is that none of these options should be used as a sole source of truth. Instead, you should collect data from all three sources, compare it, and track trends over time. This will allow you to triangulate a rough story of which campaigns/audiences/ads are performing best at any given time.

If pulling data from multiple sources seems like a lot of work, you’d be right. One of the things we use to make our lives easier is a plugin for Google Sheets called Supermetrics. It allows us to import data from multiple sources (including website, GA4, and in-platform sources) and can be automated and can update itself on a given, programmed schedule. Creating a dashboard of all data sources in Google Sheets is the best way to streamline the data collection process so you can get the data you need to optimize your campaigns without too much extra work.