What happened to my sales when I changed my ad spend?

The Spend changes report finds each time your ad spend went up or down in the past 30 days and shows what your store sales did after.

What it answers

When you spent more here, what happened? The report looks at your Meta and Google spend day by day, finds each time it changed, and shows what your sales did in the days after.

What counts as a change

A campaign or ad set counts as changed when its daily spend goes up or down by 25% or more compared with the 7 days before, or when it is switched on or off. Very small budgets are ignored.

For Meta the report follows how your account is built. With several campaigns that carry real spend it compares campaigns. With one main campaign it compares ad sets, and with one ad set it compares ads. Google is always compared by campaign.

What you see

• The short version: one sentence about your biggest spend change and what store sales did after it, with a chart of Ad spend and Store sales per day.
• Sales by channel for the whole period: every channel's Sales from your real orders, its Share of all store sales, your Ad spend there and, in grey, what the ad platform itself reports under Platform says.
• What to take from this: up to three conclusions, written by AI from the numbers in the report. Treat them as things to test.
• Why your sales went up or down: one card for each jump or drop in store sales, either a single day or a new level that held for 7 days. It shows how much Store sales and Ad spend moved, Channels that moved most, What you changed around it in the 14 days before, and Our theory for why it happened.
• How your changes affected each other: a short list of takeaways on how a change in one place seems to have moved sales somewhere else, for example more Meta spend followed by more sales from Google organic search. It is an educated guess written by AI from the numbers in the report, and each takeaway is marked Likely, Possible or Hard to tell. Pairs that showed up more than once are listed under Seen more than once in your numbers.
• Each time your spend changed: one card per change. Changes made within a few days of each other share a card, because their effect cannot be told apart. The card says which days are Before and which are After.
  • Ad spend per week: before and after, in total and per ad platform.
  • Store sales in the 7 days after: the change in your real store orders, with what Meta and Google say next to it in grey.
  • Store sales the week after that: the same, one week later. It reads Not enough days yet when that week has not passed.
  • Where the sales came from: your real orders split by the channel that brought the customer, as tracked by TrueROAS, Before and After the change. This is where you see a change on one platform show up on another channel.
  • What you changed: every campaign or ad set that changed, with the Meta or Google Ads logo, its type, its spend per day before and after, and under Inside the ads or ad sets that got the money.

A card says Includes the changes from and a date when a later change falls inside the days being measured. Read that number with care.

Why two sales numbers

Store sales are your real orders. What Meta and Google say is what each platform claims for itself. When the platforms report a big lift and store sales stay flat, the lift is mostly the platforms taking credit for orders you would have had anyway.

Good to know

• The report covers the past 30 days. You cannot pick another period.
• It reads Meta Ads and Google Ads. Other ad platforms are not included.
• It shows what happened after a change, not proof of the cause. A sale, a holiday or a price change in the same week moves sales too.
• Everything written by AI in this report, the conclusions, the theories and the takeaways, is a guess and not proof. It only sees your ad spend and your sales. It cannot see a sale, a newsletter, a stock problem or a holiday, so it can only say when the cause was probably outside your ads.
• The takeaways under How your changes affected each other are a guess too. When you change many things on the same days, they are marked Hard to tell. Changing one thing at a time gives clearer answers.
• When your tracking is new, sales per campaign use what Meta and Google report. The report says so at the bottom. Store sales and sales per channel are always your real orders.
• The report is for the whole store. Making it again for the same days replaces the old one.
• It has no Share Report button, so it cannot be shared with a link. To delete it, see How do I share or delete a report?.
• To make one, see How do I create a new report?.