On an intraday basis your cost will usually not match exactly. This is because we retrieve your ad cost data once an hour, so your cost data in ClickMagick can be up to one hour behind what you see in Facebook.

So keep in mind that if you select any date range that includes today, you may see a small difference due to that.

You may also see a small discrepancy if your ClickMagick Project time zone does not match your Facebook ad account time zone. You can’t change the time zone of your ad account, but in this case you may be able to adjust your ClickMagick Project time zone to match your ad account so things will match up exactly.

Other than those two common issues, there’s one more issue that can cause small discrepancies …


Facebook Unattributed Costs

With Facebook you can have new ads that have accrued costs even though they don’t have any clicks yet.

And we normally attribute your ad costs to specific clicks on specific ads – but in the case of a new ad that hasn’t yet received any clicks we obviously can’t do this.

In this case, what we do instead is keep track of these “unattributed costs” and add them to the total cost that you see in ClickMagick. But there are a few scenarios where we can’t do this, which would cause a small discrepancy.

These specific scenarios include:

1. You’re using a non-standard utm_source value.

Because there are no specific clicks related to unattributed cost, we assign the cost at the source level. Specifically we look for industry-standard utm_source values like fb or facebook. But if the utm_source value for your Facebook traffic is bananas for example, the unattributed costs will not be included anywhere.

Similarly, if you have Facebook traffic with multiple different utm_source values e.g. some with fb and some with facebook, we’ll assign the unattributed cost to the first one we “see” in your data but not the other. So make sure you’re using one single utm_source value like fb or facebook.

2. Your Facebook integration lacks the proper permissions.

If you integrated ClickMagick with Facebook a long time ago, your integration may not include the specific permissions we need for this. In this case, you’ll want to visit your Facebook integration in ClickMagick and click the button to upgrade your integration.

3. You may have added new Business Pages.

If you’ve added new Business Pages in Facebook after setting up your integration, ClickMagick may not have the necessary permission it needs to work with those pages. In this case, go to Business Integrations in Facebook to select and add the new business or new pages if not already selected.

4. Ads that don’t result in a website click.

ClickMagick is for tracking Facebook Lead Ads and ads that link to a webpage. If you have any other type of Facebook ad – like an ad that only promotes a Facebook Page for example – the associated costs won’t be tracked by ClickMagick.

5. Outdated ClickMagick tracking code.

The tracking of unattributed costs for ads that haven’t yet received any clicks relies on us being able to figure out which ClickMagick Project the ads should be associated with. In order to do this, we retrieve the URL each ad points to, and we parse the ClickMagick tracking code on that page.

This means that if you do not have ClickMagick tracking code on the page an ad leads to, or that tracking code is outdated and does not include the cmc_project value, the unattributed cost cannot be processed.

Article 958 Last updated: 11/19/2025 9:17:32 AM
https://www.clickmagick.com/kb/?article=958