You've probably noticed the inconsistency.
Facebook Ads Manager says you had 180 conversions last week. Your Shopify dashboard shows 95 completed orders. Your Google Analytics shows 110 sessions from Facebook. Three platforms, three different numbers, none of them matching.
This isn't a glitch. It's signal loss — and it's getting worse.
What signal loss actually is
Signal loss happens when the data chain connecting a marketing touchpoint (someone seeing or clicking your ad) to a conversion event (a sale, a signup) gets broken somewhere in the middle.
The data is real. The purchase happened. But the software couldn't connect the click to the conversion, so it either misses it entirely or attributes it to the wrong source.
Three things are responsible for most of it:
Ad blockers. Somewhere around 40% of desktop users have some form of ad blocking installed. Most of these tools don't just block ads — they also block the analytics scripts that fire on your site. When a user with an ad blocker lands on your page after clicking your Facebook ad, the Facebook Pixel can't fire. Facebook never sees the conversion.
Apple's privacy updates. Since iOS 14.5, iPhones prompt users to opt out of cross-app tracking. Most do. This means the device ID that Facebook previously used to connect an ad click to an app conversion is unavailable. Facebook has to model these conversions statistically — and their models are, charitably, optimistic.
Browser privacy features. Safari, Firefox, and now Chrome have built-in protections that block or limit cross-site cookies. A user who clicks an ad in Safari and then visits your site 25 hours later may not be trackable at all under Safari's 24-hour cookie expiration rules.
Why this matters more than just the number being off
The missing data doesn't just make your reports inaccurate. It actively worsens how the ad platform spends your money.
Facebook's campaign optimization algorithm needs conversion signal to figure out which users are worth showing your ads to. When conversions go missing, the algorithm loses its feedback loop. It thinks your campaign is performing worse than it is, bids differently, and shifts spend toward audiences where tracking happens to still work — which are not necessarily your best audiences.
You end up in a cycle where poor data leads to poor optimization leads to poor performance, which looks like a bad campaign even when the underlying product and creative are fine.
How to cut through it
You can't force users to disable their ad blockers. But you can move the data collection to a place blockers can't reach.
Server-side link tracking captures the click before the user's browser is involved. gometrify does exactly this — every link click goes through our edge servers, which log the data and redirect the user in under 30 milliseconds. No browser is involved until after the click is recorded, which means ad blockers and iOS privacy restrictions can't touch it.
That click record gives you an independent count that isn't subject to any of the issues above. When you compare gometrify's click data against the platform's reported conversions, the gap tells you exactly how much signal loss you're experiencing. And when your own data shows 200 real clicks but the platform is claiming 90 conversions, you have the real number to make budget decisions from.