The Meta Attribution Gap: What Happens When Pixels Don’t Match Reality
Jul 21, 2025
Your pixel isn’t lying.
But it might be misleading you.
In our last launch, Meta reported 114 conversions.
Our checkout backend—Thrivecart—showed only 55.
That’s not a small discrepancy. That’s a problem.
Where It Broke:
🌐 What Meta Tracked:
Pixel fired on every conversion event
Rebill payments triggered the same purchase event
Result: inflated conversion count
📊 What Thrivecart Tracked:
First-time payments separated from rebills
Unique customer IDs tied to each purchase
Result: clean, trustworthy attribution
Why It Matters
When your pixel counts rebills as new purchases:
Your ROAS looks inflated
Your funnel seems healthier than it is
Your CAC calculations fall apart
You're not optimizing performance—you’re optimizing fiction.
What We Did
Built a custom conversion for first-time subscription purchases
Set Thrivecart as our source of truth for real revenue and new customer data
Created new attribution dashboards to exclude rebills and show clean CAC
The Takeaway
Pixels are great. But they don’t understand your billing logic.
Especially with subscriptions or rebillable high-ticket offers, you need more than surface-level data.
If your backend and ad platform aren't speaking the same language, you're scaling on shaky ground.
Validate. Align. Clean your data.
Because what gets reported drives what gets optimized.
And what gets optimized—better be real.