Variance Index

How much are your platforms lying?

The first public benchmark for platform over-reporting. Quarterly. Anonymized. Cross-customer. Platform-reported conversions vs deduplicated cross-channel truth. Period: 2026-Q1.

Headline

Across 42 customers, platforms over-report conversions by a median of +28.0%

Weighted across 5 channels and $3.4M of ad spend in 2026-Q1. See the methodology below.

Per-channel breakdown

Sorted by spend · k-anonymity floor: n ≥ 5

Channel	Median over-report	Range (p25–p75)	Orgs	Spend ($)
Meta	+34.8%	+22.1% → +51.2%	42	$1.3M
Google CM360	+14.6%	+7.8% → +23.1%	35	$780K
TikTok	+46.2%	+31.5% → +68.4%	28	$540K
The Trade Desk	+8.4%	+3.2% → +15.7%	18	$420K
LinkedIn	+27.5%	+18.2% → +42.8%	14	$320K

Methodology

For each customer + channel + period, we compute (platformReported − standardized) / standardized × 100.
Across all contributing customers, we publish the median, p25, and p75 of that distribution — never per-customer values.
“Standardized” means the AdTempo de-duplicated view across all connected platforms — the same number that appears on each customer's Attribution page.
The headline stat is weighted by ad spend across the published channels.

Privacy

Channels with fewer than 5 contributing customers are excluded from the benchmark.
We only publish aggregate statistics (median, p25, p75, total spend). We never publish per-customer numbers.
Customer identities, campaign names, and entity-level data never leave the customer's own workspace.
The index is recomputed weekly and frozen for publication at the end of each calendar quarter.

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