Discrepancy Between TikTok Ad Data and Adobe Analytics - Need Help

[Luciano_Rizzuti]

Hi everyone,

We are experiencing an issue on our site that we hope you can help us with.

Our company regularly runs TikTok ads, and we are, of course, interested in analyzing the campaign data.

However, the data displayed in the TikTok Business Manager is significantly higher than what we see in our dashboard, with hardly any traffic visible.

Our website is built on AEM and also uses Adobe Analytics.

Our consent manager is Usercentrics, and we have the TikTok pixel integrated into our site.

For comparison - TikTok shows 290 pageviews for a sample campaign, while Adobe Analytics shows no pageviews, only 4 occurrences.

Usercentrics shows 45 consents via the cookie banner, with a consent rate of 100%.

We can definitely rule out our firewall blocking traffic from the website, and traffic is not being redirected to another site.

We use a link parameter to track traffic, which we embed in the link. Although it’s known that TikTok alters the link, the parameter remains intact in all known cases.

We have also searched for the extension in Adobe Data Collection, but it is no longer visible in the catalog. We are referring to the following article: TikTok Server Side Extension.

Does anyone have any ideas on what we could work on?

Thank you very much in advance for your help.

Best regards,

Luciano

[Jennifer_Dungan]

This is an issue that affects all pixel trackers like this, TikTok, Meta, Google Ads, etc...

The problem is that they can only see their data, not the whole of what is happening on your site.... you may also want to look at what attribution your TikTok pixel is set to.

Basically, when someone clicks on the ad, the service will drop a cookie on the user's device (this may be a 30 day cookie, or a 7 day cookie, etc).. and if the user converts within that time frame then a conversion against your ad will be recorded...

But in reality, that TikTok ad was likely not the last driver, so Adobe will record the attribution very differently, as it can see everything that is driving traffic to your site.

[bjoern__koth]

Fully agree with @Jennifer_Dungan 

Also, typically tictac will rather be classified as a marketing tag, whereas Adobe Analytics would be a performance tag, so differences in cookie consent may also occur (even if that is rather rare).

we have seen the same problem with vendors like LinkedIn which claim an almost 10x times higher click-through rate than what we can see reaching on the website which, cannot be explained with cookie consent or ad blockers.

Frankly, it sometimes feels like they might inflate their numbers to look better and justify the money they charge you for displaying your ads, but that may just be my opinion... 

we also sometimes saw redirects that would cut off query params you set on the ad URLs, so there are a bunch of things that may go wrong

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Lol.. 

Frankly, it sometimes feels like they might inflate their numbers to look better and justify the money they charge you for displaying your ads

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Yeah, that seems accurate to me!

Anyway, all of these pixel trackers are "greedy"... trying to get the attribution... if you have a lot of them, and a lot of cross channel traffic you will see that they all try to take attribution.. and if you add those up the number of conversions would be highly inflated.

Our philosophy is to basically treat these like Participants, but not necessarily the Direct Driver...