Ads and GA4 report different conversion counts - which one goes in the board deck?

Question

Every month I reconcile these two and every month they disagree by 15 to 20 percent (Ads
higher, consistently). I know the textbook answer is that they count different things. What I
don't have is a defensible one-line version for a CFO who thinks one of the numbers is
simply wrong.

As far as I can tell it's three things: attribution (Ads credits the click, GA4 credits the
session), the conversion window (ours are different lengths and nobody remembers choosing
either), and modelled conversions in Ads that GA4 has no equivalent for.

Does anyone have a version of this they actually use with finance? Not the technical
explanation - the one that survives contact with someone who suspects marketing invents its
own numbers.

Priya Deshmukh · Answer

The line I use: Ads answers "did the advertising cause this", GA4 answers "what did the
user do on the site". Different questions, so different answers are both correct, and the
gap is not an error rate.

Then I put both in the deck with the definition printed under each. The moment you present
one number alone you are implicitly claiming it is the truth, and you will spend the rest
of the year defending that claim instead of the work.

Marcus Hale · Answer

Worth checking the windows before you explain anything - ours were 30 day in one and 90 in
the other, and half the gap went away when we aligned them.

Cheap thing to rule out first.

Ads and GA4 report different conversion counts - which one goes in the board deck?

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