EP 484: Did Facebook Ads Really Cause That Sale?

Show Notes:

📊 Why Facebook ad attribution data may not tell the complete story
🧩 How websites, shopping carts, analytics, CRMs, and Meta can report the same customer journey differently
⚙️ Why checking the technical setup comes before trusting the numbers
⚖️ Phil’s scale analogy for using imperfect but consistent data
🔍 Why Ads Manager should be compared with sales, website, analytics, and CRM data
🗂️ How combining multiple data sources can make trends easier to evaluate
🚫 The danger of treating every sale as either completely caused by Facebook ads or completely unrelated
🔄 How paid ads and organic marketing can support each other across a longer customer journey
👀 Why an ad may create awareness even when the eventual purchase is credited somewhere else
⏸️ Phil’s example of sales dropping after ads that looked uncertain in Ads Manager were turned off
🧠 Why advertisers should avoid judging ads in isolation or making rigid decisions from one report
✅ Reminder: every business is unique, results vary, and there are no guaranteed outcomes

Transcript Disclaimer

This transcript was generated automatically using AI transcription tools and may include errors, omissions, or wording that differs from what was intended. I have not reviewed every word, and no part of this transcript should be interpreted as an income claim, success guarantee, or promise of results of any kind. The information is for educational purposes only.

Transcript:

Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Next Level Facebook Ads Podcast with Phil Graham. We help you master Facebook ads and give you an unfair advantage over your competition. Are you ready? Let’s go.
Speaker 2:
The podcast family, welcome to the Next Level Facebook Ads Podcast episode 484 for August 18th, 2026. Today, we’re going to talk about did Facebook and Instagram ads really create and cause that sale. So it’s interesting. This is going to be more of a concept strategic type of episode that is really going to be pretty short, I think. I try and keep them short. And I think it’s going to hopefully help you think of things in a little bit of a different way than many advertisers do.
Before we jump into that, though, if you guys are needing any help with your ads, whether it’s one-on-one coaching or someone to run your ads for you, just go to my website, PhilGrahamdigital.com, or you can DM me on Instagram at PhilGrahamdigital. We can set up a short Zoom call and I would love to connect with you. Also on my website at PhilGrahamdigital.com, I do have show notes of every episode and you can even listen on there if you want to. So lots of good resources on the podcast page there. So let’s talk about real quick, did Facebook really cause the sale. Here’s the challenge when it comes to attribution and reporting and stuff like that.
I see a lot of people, really many advertisers, if not most, make mistakes when it comes to this. The data is not always totally clean because you have so many different systems talking to each other. You’ve got Facebook, you’ve got your own website, whether it’s WordPress, Shopify, or something else. You’ve got sometimes a separate billing system or shopping cart system. You might have analytics. You’ve got very possibly and probably a CRM. Like you got all these moving pieces, all this technology trying to talk to each other. And sometimes things are not always correct in terms of what you see in the data. Now, what I recommend is looking at things, knowing that, hey, it might not be correct, but if it’s even generally in the ballpark, then that’s good to know. It’s like using a weight scale. If you weigh yourself every day, every week or every month in scale might be off by a few pounds. If you’re using the same scale, though, every single time, you can still compare and contrast pretty effectively, as long as you’re, you know, weighing yourself at the same time of day with the same stuff on stuff like that. And so it’s similar to that. It’s still not exactly like that. But it’s similar. So the first thing is knowing that, hey, every piece of data you see might not be the absolute truth. However, if you do audit, Like what I like to do is audit the whole technical system to make sure that everybody can see when a purchase goes through or when a lead comes through or a call gets scheduled when somebody shows up for a booked call, stuff like that.
And you want to make sure that all that stuff shows up first, because if your technical stuff behind all this is not correct, then it’s going to be a mess. If it’s correct, it’s still probably not going to be exact, but it should be at least in the ballpark that you can kind of count on it if you look at everything. And the other thing that I want to mention in regards to this, so I don’t just look at what the ads manager data tells me.
I compare that to sales data, to website data, to Google analytics, to CRM data. And many times, depending on the situation, depending on the client, we might aggregate all that data into one place where it’s easy to identify, look at, view trends, stuff like that. And that can be really powerful. But whether you do that or not, I encourage you guys to really look at data from many different sources. So you have different sources of truth that hopefully combine into one.
So that should help you try and determine what sales came from where. But here’s the other thing I want to mention, because this is the thing that I really want you to hear in this episode more than probably anything else. And that is this, because this is not a technical episode about how to do all this. Like, in fact, that’s something that you would probably need consulting for because you can’t just, everybody’s got different systems. So it’s a heads up on this stuff, but here’s what I really want you to hear. So many people will draw a line in the sand and say, okay, this sale either came from Facebook or it didn’t. Total failure on the ad or total success on the ad. And I don’t see things that way. Here’s what I’ve found in my years of running ads is that ads help organic, organic helps ads, or even ads on one platform can help ads on a different platform and vice versa. So for example, I’ve had situations where a client was running ads, especially years ago, there was some pretty muddy data and less data than we have now.
And they were like, they weren’t sure if the ads were really converting or not. They thought they might’ve been, but they weren’t sure. So we turned them off for a week and they thought that things would be kind of okay. Well, their sales just plummeted. They could not get me on the phone fast enough. They were emailing, calling, texting, DMing, everything. Get the ads on quick because they just plummeted. And the interesting thing was in the ads manager, it really didn’t look like the ads were crushing it, but here’s the thing. What the ads were doing was giving awareness and it a mixture of cold traffic plus people that already followed them as well, cold and warm traffic. And it was working together with what they had already done on the organic side. And so it was hard to attribute a sale to one specific thing. You know, if somebody sees an ad and then let’s say they follow you on Instagram or somewhere else, and then nine months later they buy something, you’re going to think it’s because of Instagram or TikTok or wherever they followed you. But if they never would have known about you had it not been for the ad nine months ago, then they never would have found you and they never would have bought. And so my point is this, I don’t look at ads in a silo. I look at it along with everything else. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t judge them and be careful with cost per purchase and all that stuff. But I also don’t like being too rigid because if you just silo everything, I think that could do more harm than good in certain situations.
So I hope this is helpful. I didn’t want to get too technical on this, but my point is this, whether your ads came from Facebook or not, that is a valid question. And sometimes the quality of your data can answer that question. And we work hard at doing that. But even when you’re not 100% sure, there’s a lot of value in using those ads to get in front of people and combined with anything and everything else you do. And so you might not want to judge anything too harshly before you either have a professional set of eyes on that or professionally look at it yourself and really know you might not want to just turn something off because you’re unsure.
So I hope that was helpful, you guys. Episode 484 is in the books. Thank you so much for being here.
And as always, just a reminder, it’s always important to point out that every business is unique. Results can vary. There’s no guaranteed outcomes.
So always keep that in mind. Next week, we’ve got a great show. We’re going to talk about how if you’re struggling with Facebook or Instagram ads, it might not be an ad problem.
It might be a sales problem or something else on the other side of that ad. So make sure and check that out. Until then, I hope you guys have a great rest of the week.
Talk to you next week. Peace out.
Speaker 1:
Thanks for listening to the Next Level Facebook Ads Podcast. Please remember to subscribe and share this with all your friends. For show notes, more tips, and to learn more about Phil, please visit PhilGrahamDigital.com/Podcast.