Purchase Value
The revenue Meta credits to your ads — its number, not your shop's ledger.
What it means
Purchase Value is the total value of the purchases Meta attributes to your ads in the period. It's revenue before product cost, shipping and refunds — and refunds never come back out of it. Meta dates each sale by the ad click, not the order, so it won't match Shopify and isn't meant to.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Purchase Value = the total value of purchases Meta attributes to your ads. Meta claims a sale when it can tie the buyer to an ad they clicked or saw inside its attribution window.
It's dated by the ad, not the order. A click on the 30th and a purchase on the 2nd lands in the previous month here and this month in Shopify.
Worked example. Video formats take €4,000 of Spend and return a Purchase Value of €18,000 — a return of 4.5 for every euro. Static formats take €4,000 and return €10,000, or 2.5.
Now take 40% product cost and 8% shipping off both. Video leaves €9,360 against €4,000 of Spend; static leaves €5,200 against the same €4,000. So video clears €5,360 over its Spend and static clears €1,200 — video is more than 4× ahead, where revenue alone put it at 1.8×.
It answers the question
How much revenue did Meta credit to these ads? On its own it's a total with no verdict in it — read it against the Spend that produced it.
Why it matters
Two columns on the Ad Formats table are built from this. ROAS is Purchase Value over Spend, AOV is Purchase Value over Purchases, and both inherit whatever attribution decisions sit inside it.
It's also the fastest way to decide where creative money goes. Sort by Purchase Value, then read the Spend column across — the format earning a big share of the revenue on a small share of the budget is the one to brief next.
What good looks like
No standard applies to a total: it rises with your budget and with the size of your store. Read it per euro of Spend, and against the same period last quarter for your own trend. A format with half the Purchase Value on a quarter of the Spend is the better format, and only the ratio shows it.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Move budget to the format that returns most | Rank formats by Purchase Value per euro of Spend and shift 20% of the budget up the list | Purchase Value up on flat Spend | 1–2 weeks | Concentration burns a format out faster. Frequency climbs on the winner and you'll need a replacement sooner than planned. |
| Fast Fix the page the ad points at | Match the landing page to the ad's promise — same product, same price, same offer, above the fold | Purchase Value up, Spend unchanged | 3–7 days | Development time, and it only pays where the mismatch was real. A faster page won't rescue an offer nobody wants. |
| Slow Raise what an order is worth | Bundles, a free-shipping threshold above your current average, a second-item offer | Purchase Value up without more clicks | 3–6 weeks | Discounted bundles buy revenue with margin. Gross Margin falls on every order, so this can grow the number here and shrink what you keep. |
| Slow Brief creative for the formats that convert | Build for the format earning the revenue, not the one that's cheapest to produce | Purchase Value up per euro spent | 1 quarter | Production budget, and a new concept that loses to the incumbent still takes spend to find out. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
Revenue alone hides which half moved. Next to the order count, it tells you whether you sold more baskets or bigger ones.
More orders, more money
Revenue grew because more people bought, not because you discounted your way there. The cleanest kind of growth on this table.
Fewer, bigger baskets
Average order value carried this — usually a bundle or a price rise. Good for revenue, and it means fewer new customers came in.
Busier and poorer
More orders worth less each. Discount-led buying does this, and Gross Margin falls faster than the revenue line suggests.
Both directions wrong
Fewer orders and smaller ones. Confirm the budget didn't move first — a format that got cut lands here looking like a failure.
Neither one is a verdict alone. €18,000 of Purchase Value is excellent on €4,000 of Spend and poor on €12,000, and the smallest revenue on the table is often the row you should be funding. Together they turn a ranking of size into a ranking of worth.
This pair says whether the revenue was worth having. Two formats can return the same Purchase Value while one sells your 60% margin range and the other clears discounted stock at 25%. Scaling on revenue alone is how accounts grow while profit doesn't.
Common misreads
They count different things on purpose. Meta credits a sale to the ad that earned the click, on the day of the click; Shopify records the order when it's paid and knows nothing about ads. Use this figure to compare ads with each other, and Shopify to know what you sold.
A buyer who saw a video ad and an image ad can be credited on both rows, so the column sums to more than you sold. Compare rows against each other, don't total them.
It's revenue before product cost, shipping and refunds. A campaign selling heavily discounted stock lifts this number while Contribution Margin falls.
Also called
Purchase conversion value · conversion value · attributed revenue
See yoursYour Purchase Value by creative format, next to the Spend that earned it.
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