How to deduplicate conversions across platforms
A single sale can be claimed by GA4, Google Ads and Meta all at once, so adding up your platforms gives a total far bigger than your real orders. Deduplication is how you stop counting the same conversion more than once.
Two kinds of duplication
- Within one platform: the same conversion fires twice (pixel plus server, or a duplicate tag), fixed with a shared event ID, see duplicate CAPI events and duplicate conversions in GA4.
- Across platforms: each platform legitimately claims the same sale on its own attribution rules. This is not a bug you can fully remove.
Fixing within-platform duplication
Send a unique transaction or event ID with every conversion so each platform can recognise and drop the duplicate. This is the single most important setting for pixel-plus-server (CAPI, Events API) setups, and the usual cause of conversions doubling overnight.
Handling cross-platform overlap
You cannot make Google and Meta stop both claiming a shared sale, they measure independently. Instead, never sum their reported conversions as if they were additive. Use one neutral source of truth, your order data or GA4, for total sales, and use each platform's numbers only to trend that platform. That mindset is what keeps Meta vs Google Ads gaps from fooling you.
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