Black Friday on Meta and Google: report the sales that hit the bank

Pull the payments for the sale dates first, in the client's time zone, net of any refunds you already know about. Then put Meta's and Google's claimed revenue next to that total, one line each, and never add them into a single "ads revenue" line. Show the gap between the claims and the payments as its own line, with one sentence on why it's there. Meta and Google can both claim the same sale, and sale week is when your client is most likely to notice.

Meta credits a purchase to an ad if it happened "within a certain number of days after someone viewed or clicked on your ad" (Meta Business Help Center). How many days depends on the ad set's attribution setting. Meta's Results help page says "Meta uses a default attribution setting of 7-day click, 1-day view and 1-day engagement conversion" (Meta Business Help Center, Results). We explain the windows in more detail in Meta's attribution window, explained.

So a sale on Friday can be credited to an ad someone clicked on Tuesday. That matters in a week when costs and buying move fast. One store owner on r/FacebookAds wrote in November 2025 that an early Black Friday sale "averaged a 3x ROAS. On Sunday afternoon performance began to drop as CPMs spiked." Their first full sale day came in at "ROAS was 1.88" (r/FacebookAds thread).

A reply from someone on their sixth or seventh BFCM described their previous year: "Tuesday - Thursday were 1.7-1.9x. Then Friday was 4.5x". That's one account's week, never a benchmark. It does show why a daily Meta report during sale week can swing from bad to great and back, before a single refund comes in.

Google's conversion window works differently. For a new conversion action, "the default window is 30 days", and you can set it "anywhere from 1 to 90 days, depending on the source of conversions" (Google Ads Help, conversion windows).

The date matters as much as the window. "Google Ads reports conversions on the ad impression date. Other reporting tools attribute them to the conversion date" (Google Ads Help, data discrepancies). Another help page puts it as "Google Ads has always reported conversions by the date your ad was clicked" (Google Ads Help, conversions by time). Either way, a sale on Friday from a click on the Monday before lands on the earlier date in the default columns.

Two things follow. A Black Friday report pulled on the default columns can move sales onto days before the sale. And it can keep growing after the week ends, as late buyers convert inside the window. Google suggests adding the "Conversions (by conv. time)" columns for reporting that lines up with tools that count by the date of the sale.

On Google attribution models: Google's own setting decides how credit is split between Google clicks, and "The "Data-driven" model is the default attribution model for most conversion actions" (Google Ads Help, attribution models). That's a Google setting. It splits credit inside Google and says nothing about Meta.

Each platform counts conversions under its own rules and its own window, and neither one removes sales the other already took. Sale week packs a lot of clicks from both into a few days, so the same shopper touching both is more likely. People search for this as "over attribution".

The posters on r/PPC and r/DigitalMarketing describe it plainly. An r/PPC post from June 2026 says Google Ads and Meta "Both will happily claim the exact same sale, so of course the totals overlap and inflate" (r/PPC thread). An older r/PPC thread asked how to work out each platform's ROAS "when meta and google are both taking credit for the same sales", and one reply said "Facebook usually reports about twice as many conversions as GA" (r/PPC thread). That's one poster's view, not a rule.

The clearest example isn't from Black Friday at all. In a November 2025 r/DigitalMarketing post, a brand's Google Ads report showed 180K of revenue and Meta's showed 160K, against 220K of revenue for the month, so "they made 154% of their revenue from ads" (r/DigitalMarketing thread). Sale week runs the same sum, with more clicks squeezed into fewer days.

Sample only. Invented for teaching. Not an industry average, not a customer result. Every figure here is illustrative.

Over Fri 27 Nov to Mon 30 Nov a client spends €8,000 on Meta and €4,000 on Google. Meta claims €30,000 of purchases and Google claims €18,000. Added together, the claims come to €48,000, which looks like a 4.0 ROAS on €12,000 of spend.

Payments in the client's processor for the same four days and time zone come to €34,000. Of those, €27,000 trace back to visits from the client's campaigns. The rest came from email, organic search and people typing the address in.

That €14,000 is the line the client will ask about. Better that your report raises it than their accountant.

Here's the order we'd put it together in.

Want a starting layout for the Google side? Our Google Ads report template works for the weekly version too.

Plenty of people look up how to run Black Friday ads. Almost nobody searches for how to report them afterwards. In our keyword pull, "black friday facebook ads" and "black friday google ads" each got about 210 US searches a month, while none of the reporting phrases we checked, such as "black friday marketing report" and "bfcm results report", returned any volume (OpenSEO, US, 20 Oct 2026).

If part of your fee rides on these Black Friday numbers, agree the revenue number before you set a performance fee.

You can paste something like this into the recap email:

"Meta and Google each count a sale when someone bought within their own window after seeing or clicking an ad. Some shoppers did both this week, so some sales sit in both reports. That's why the two added together come to more than you were paid. The numbers below start from your payments and show which campaigns they came from."

If they want one number for the whole account, walk them through blended ROAS and MER. Both start from revenue counted once.

Thexly matches each payment in your client's processor to the campaign visit that led to it, counted once. That gives you which campaigns produced the payments, next to what each platform claims. Each client gets a workspace, and you can share a read-only link they open without logging in (how a live client report works). The trial is 14 days and needs no card.

What it doesn't do: it doesn't send conversions back to Meta or Google, and it doesn't pull ad spend, so you bring spend from the client's ad accounts. It doesn't change or fix the platforms' own numbers either. To see the gap for one client before the recap, try the platform vs payment gap tool or run a payment gap check.

What's the gap you're bracing for on this year's recap? Tell us at hello@thexly.com.