You're spending money on Meta and Google ads. But do you actually know which one is working?

If your answer involves opening three different dashboards and hoping the numbers roughly agree, this post is for you. So let me try and make this less confusing because honestly, most people in this space overcomplicate it.

Picture this. You're running ads on Meta and Google at the same time. Someone sees your Meta ad on Monday, your Google ad on Wednesday, and installs your app on Thursday. Both platforms look at that install and say "that was us."

Neither is lying exactly, they're just each telling their own version of the story. This is why your platform numbers almost always look rosier than what's actually happening.

Your MMP, so that's something like AppsFlyer, Adjust or Branch, is the third party sitting in the middle trying to make sense of all of it. It pulls signals from every platform and makes a call on where each install actually came from. It's not perfect but it's the most neutral read you're going to get.

Then there's SKAN, which is Apple's way of protecting iOS user privacy. Post iOS 14, your MMP can't see individual user behaviour on iPhone anymore. What it gets instead is batched, delayed, anonymised data that Apple decides to share, on Apple's timeline.

Could be hours, could be a couple of days. And because it's aggregated, it will never line up cleanly with what your MMP is showing in real time.

On top of that your SDK is firing events from inside the app while your server is recording things on the backend, and those two don't always talk to each other cleanly either.

So yes, your Meta dashboard, your MMP, and your backend will show three different numbers. Every single time. That's not a sign something is broken. It's just how the ecosystem works and the sooner you accept that, the better decisions you'll make.

What actually matters: are you set up to make good decisions?

The goal isn't perfect data. It's directionally accurate data that you can act on.

So the real questions are:

• Are your MMP installs and ad platform installs within a reasonable range of each other?
• Are you sending actual revenue events back to your ad platforms so they optimise for the right signal?
• Is your SKAN conversion value mapped to something meaningful like trial start or first payment?
• And are you cross-checking your MMP data against your backend before making budget decisions?

If the answer to any of those is no, you're making spend decisions based on incomplete information.

The analogy I always use:

Your ad platform data is your sales team's report. Optimistic, claims everything. Your MMP is your finance team's report. More conservative, tries to be fair. Your backend is your bank statement. The only number that's actually real. Use all three together and never trust just one.