---
title: "Case study: Is Meta worth it? Reconcile it with your own data and find out"
description: "A consultant reconciled a D2C brand’s Meta numbers with GA4 in Rig, found the gap in what each signup cost, and answered whether the spend was worth it."
canonical: "https://rig.so/case-studies/damson-data"
format: markdown
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Consulting partners · Independent consultancy

# Is Meta worth it? Reconcile it with your own data and find out

Anthony of Damson Data set out to answer one question for a D2C brand: was its Meta advertising a good investment? Reconciling Meta’s numbers with GA4 in Rig exposed a gap between what Meta reported and what each signup really cost, and working through that gap gave the brand an answer it could act on.

**£15**cost per signup claimed by Meta

**£22**blended cost per signup across every channel, including free traffic

**£48 to £55**per signup from a regression on daily spend, the most credible answer

> “Having all of this data on tap and exposable to AI means that you can do best in class statistics at the speed of light.”

Anthony, Damson Data

Watch Anthony walk through the attribution work

Anthony also walked through this at the [Rigfest client showcase](https://rig.so/events/rigfest-client-showcase).

[Before](#before)[Meta and GA4](#reconcile)[Attribution](#attribution)[Regression](#regression)

## A platform grading its own numbers

Meta claimed £15 per signup for the client’s ad spend, below the business’s blended £22 across every channel. A paid channel coming in that far below a blend that includes free and organic traffic warranted a closer look.

Without reconciling Meta’s top-of-funnel data against what converted downstream, nobody could say whether the platform’s number was real.

## Reconcile Meta with GA4

Rig brought Meta’s click and impression data and GA4’s conversions into one warehouse, joined, so Anthony could take the top of the funnel from Meta and the bottom from GA4. Reconciled that way, Meta was costing £104 for each signup.

## Build a custom attribution model

Anthony then built a custom waterfall attribution model, ranking each customer’s data by quality to tag where they came from. It could place about 80% of customers, and it put the cost per signup higher still, at £139 to £170.

## Check it with statistics

A regression of daily Meta spend against signups gave about £48. Using only the weeks when Meta and Google spend moved in opposite directions, to separate the two channels, gave about £55. Anthony judged that range the most credible, with error bars showing how sure the answer can be.

He is now tracing why the methods disagree, from the way tagging is done to customers who drop out of a journey and restart it on another device.

Talk to Rig

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