Revenue lives in your store, spend lives in the ad platforms, and return comes out of the join between them. That join is exactly where most reported ROAS figures go wrong.
Monthly spend is 100,000 SAR across four campaigns. Matching on UTM alone, 60,000 SAR joins to known campaigns and 40,000 SAR lands in an unknown bucket, because links were tagged with different names or not tagged at all.
Recorded revenue is 300,000 SAR.
The decisions you built on 5.0, raising budget, widening audiences, cutting another channel, were all taken against spend that never entered the calculation.
Pull total spend from each platform for one closed month and compare it against the spend you can match to known campaigns. The difference is the bucket, and that figure alone tells you how wrong your current ROAS is before you fix anything.
A UTM is a string somebody typed, and that's the whole problem:
summer, summer_2027 and Summer are three campaigns to a matcher and one campaign to a human.The click identifier solves this. Every platform stamps its own identifier on the click, such as fbclid, gclid and ttclid. It arrives in the URL, and the platform itself can tell you which campaign it belongs to.
| Join key | Created by | Fails when |
|---|---|---|
| UTM string | A person | Naming drifts, or someone forgets to tag |
| Click ID | The ad platform | A redirect strips it, or the browser blocks capture |
Capturing the click identifier server-side, at the order, is what makes that second row robust. It's the same mechanism that keeps a source through a payment redirect.
Spend isn't one report among many. It's the denominator, so an error in it spreads into every efficiency figure you have:
The platform's own ROAS doesn't solve this either, because it uses its own conversion count over its own window: why Meta reports more conversions.
In Flowfy, click identifiers are captured server-side and stored on the order, and orders carry their channel, campaign, ad set and ad, which is the prerequisite for any reliable join. Ad spend connectors, meaning daily spend pulled from Meta, Google, TikTok and Snapchat and joined on the click identifier, haven't shipped and are on the roadmap. Until they do, revenue by source is available in Flowfy, the spend figure comes from your ad accounts, and you join them in a spreadsheet. The arithmetic above works today, but it takes a manual step.
Size your unknown bucket for a single month. Until you know how big it is, you don't know how wrong the numbers you're acting on are.
Instalment providers take the blame, but the mechanism is broader. Any journey that leaves your domain and comes back can end the session carrying the customer's source. Here's the list, and one fix that covers most of it.
340 against 240, and both numbers are right. Four reasons the gap exists, how to measure it in your store, and which number to budget on.
Deferred payment carries higher fees and a bigger basket. Which of those wins is an arithmetic question, and most stores answer it with an opinion. Here's the maths on a hundred orders, and six steps to run it on your data.