Question from user:
How to see Facebook sales in Google analytics please?
Like campaign, ROI etc.
Answer from Nabil:
That’s a fantastic question, as getting a complete picture of your Facebook sales and ROI in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can be tricky due to platform differences and tracking challenges like browser ad-blockers and privacy restrictions.
While standard UTM tracking is essential for seeing basic traffic and campaigns in GA4’s Acquisition reports – by ensuring your Facebook ad links are tagged with parameters like utm_source=facebook and utm_medium=cpc – this method alone doesn’t always provide the most accurate or complete conversion data, especially for complex customer journeys.
The real challenge is data consistency and completeness.
Often, the sales figures reported in Facebook Ads Manager don’t align perfectly with GA4 because of different attribution models, varying lookback windows, and data loss due to client-side tracking limitations.
The best long-term, comprehensive solution to overcome these issues and get the most accurate cross-platform reporting for campaign and ROI analysis is to implement a server-side tracking setup using Facebook Conversions API (CAPI) and sending that enriched data into GA4 via the Google Analytics Data API.
Here’s why the combined solution of Facebook Conversions API + Google Analytics Data API + Google Tag Manager (GTM) + a server-side tagging solution like Stape or Google Cloud Platform is ideal.
The Facebook Conversions API lets you send web and offline events, including purchases, directly from your server to Meta, bypassing many browser-side limitations like ad blockers or reduced cookie lifespans, which improves the accuracy of Meta’s internal attribution and ad optimization.
By integrating this server-side setup using Google Tag Manager (specifically, a Server Container), you gain greater control over the data you send, allowing you to enrich it with more reliable first-party information before it even leaves your server.
This is where a managed service like Stape or using a solution hosted on Google Cloud Platform becomes extremely helpful.
These act as your dedicated server-side environment, making the setup and maintenance of the GTM Server Container much simpler than hosting it yourself, which is crucial for reliably handling and transforming the data streams.
Finally, the Google Analytics Data API is the key component that allows you to import the accurate, reliable conversion and sales data from your server-side environment, including the events enriched by CAPI, directly back into GA4.
This means you can harmonize the conversion data across both platforms, giving you a much clearer, de-duplicated, and holistic view of sales and ROI within your GA4 reports, making your analysis of campaign performance much more reliable.
In essence, you’re building a more robust and complete data pipeline that is resilient to client-side tracking limitations.
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