PROGRO
Every growth or product team has been here: marketing says one thing, finance another, and the dashboards in Looker or Power BI tell yet another story. The sign-ups don’t line up. Conversion rates vary wildly depending on which tool you check.
This isn’t because your teams can’t count. It’s because each platform measures funnels differently, and your integrations aren’t always airtight. Let’s break down why this happens and what you can do to fix it.
Attribution Models Don’t Agree
- Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and GA4 all use different attribution windows and definitions of a conversion.
- GA4 might log a “purchase” if the event fires once.
- Facebook will claim credit for a click within its attribution window.
- Stripe shows the actual money received.
- Without reconciling attribution logic, you’re comparing apples to oranges.
How to Fix it:
- Define a primary source of truth (usually your warehouse or finance system).
- Align teams on one attribution model (e.g., last-touch, first-touch, or multi-touch).
- Use a tool like Segment + dbt to enforce consistent logic across reports.
Event Tracking Inconsistencies
- If sign-up means one thing in GA4 and another in Mixpanel, you’ll never get consistent numbers.
How to Fix it:
- Maintain a tracking plan (central schema with event definitions).
- Use event QA tools (Heap Autocapture, Amplitude Data QA) to detect mismatches early.
- Implement versioned events (Signup.v1, Signup.v2) instead of overloading one.
Integration Gaps & Delayed Syncs
- Your data warehouse might refresh once a day, while ad platforms update hourly. That lag creates discrepancies.
How to Fix it:
- Set realistic SLAs for freshness (daily vs. hourly).
- Monitor pipelines with tools like Fivetran + dbt tests.
- For mission-critical funnels, set up real-time streams (Kafka, Snowflake Streams).
Establishing Your Single Source of Truth
- The fix isn’t “make GA4, Mixpanel, and Stripe agree” — it’s to pick one authoritative view and align reporting around it.
How to Fix it:
- Finance → Stripe / payments data.
- Acquisition → Warehouse-processed data with a unified attribution model.
- Product → Mixpanel / Amplitude for behavioral funnels.
- The key is documenting which tool is the truth for which metric and aligning your teams accordingly.
Your funnel will never look identical across every tool. That’s not the goal. The goal is to define your source of truth, reconcile differences, and make decisions based on the most reliable data.
Need help setting up your tracking plan and single source of truth? Let’s talk.
