Why do ad campaign numbers keep changing after the fact?
Marketing reports often look profitable at first, but later backfilled conversions, refunds, and source updates rewrite past performance data. Because original versions are overwritten, it becomes impossible to fairly evaluate whether a past decision was actually good or if the data simply shifted afterward.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
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Why do ad campaign numbers keep changing after the fact?
- 1Manually saving reports every dayDid this help you?
- 2leaving conflicting adjustment entries unedited and hoping auditors do not noticeDid this help you?
- 3stacking multiple sequential correction entries across consecutive monthsDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Has anyone ever described an accounting adjustment as a true up in monthly reporting and the following month had to create another accounting adjustment to true down the previous true up, and hope that nobody remembers the previous month true up when reporting again.”source ↗
“Every month I adjust an asset up, then down the next month based on the statement.”source ↗
“We’ve had a few campaigns look profitable when we increased spend, then checked the same date range a couple weeks later and the result was noticeably worse.”source ↗
“Right now once the source updates, we lose the original version, so it’s hard to tell whether the decision was bad or the data just changed afterward.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
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- 2How do I find a specific change in an audit log?