Meta Ads

Meta Ads is where the spend happens: campaigns, ad sets and ads across Facebook and Instagram, each with its own budget, delivery and creative.

Meta reports what it costs and what it believes it drove. It cannot report what your business actually earned, because it never sees the order.

Meta exposes delivery and cost through its Marketing API, reported against its own hierarchy of campaign, ad set and ad. Those numbers are Meta’s view: spend it charged you, and conversions it attributed to itself under its own attribution window and its own rules about which touch gets credit. Two platforms asked about the same order will both claim it, because each is answering the question “did I contribute” rather than “who earned this”.

Upstack pulls the cost side in and joins it to orders you actually recorded, matched through the fbclid carried on the click rather than through Meta’s attribution window. The result is a cost row and a revenue row that refer to the same event, which is the only basis on which true CAC and true ROAS can be computed. Because the same join runs for every platform, the double-counting resolves: an order credited by both Meta and Google is one order, and you can see which claim it more plausibly belongs to.