# Why channel and campaign totals don't add up > Under linear and time-decay attribution, the sum of credit across your Meta campaigns won't match the total credit attributed to Meta as a channel. This is by design and matches how every other multi-touch tool works — here's why. Source: https://help.tryordinary.com/concepts/channel-vs-campaign-attribution --- If you've ever compared your **Sources** page (channels) with your **Campaigns** page (individual campaigns), you may notice that under **linear** or **time-decay** attribution, the numbers don't tie out: the sum of credit across every Meta campaign doesn't equal the credit Meta gets as a channel. This is intentional, mathematically correct, and matches how every other multi-touch attribution tool on the market behaves. Here's the intuition. ## The simplest example Imagine a customer's journey to a $100 order looks like this: 1. Clicked a **Meta** ad for **Campaign A** 2. Clicked a **Meta** ad for **Campaign B** 3. Clicked a **Google** search ad 4. Bought. Three distinct ad clicks across two channels (Meta and Google). ### What the **Campaigns** view tells you Under **linear** attribution, each of the three campaign touches gets equal credit: - Campaign A: 1/3 of the order = $33.33 - Campaign B: 1/3 of the order = $33.33 - Google campaign: 1/3 of the order = $33.34 Total credit across all campaigns = $100. ✓ ### What the **Sources** view tells you Under **linear** attribution applied at the **channel** level, what matters is which *channels* touched the journey, not how many ad clicks within each channel. The customer "engaged with Meta" once and "engaged with Google" once — two channels. - Meta: 1/2 of the order = $50 - Google: 1/2 of the order = $50 Total credit across all channels = $100. ✓ ### So the sum of Meta's campaigns = $66.66, but Meta as a channel = $50 Both numbers are correct. They answer different questions: - **Campaign-level**: "If I had to choose which of my **specific campaigns** drove this purchase, how would I split the credit?" → Each Meta campaign is its own distinct touchpoint. - **Channel-level**: "If I had to choose which **channel** drove this purchase, how would I split the credit?" → Meta is one channel, regardless of how many of your Meta campaigns the customer saw. You can't have it both ways. If we *didn't* collapse Meta's two campaigns into one channel-touch at the channel level, Meta would get a 2-of-3 "vote" against Google's 1-of-3 in the channel weighting, purely because Meta had more ad clicks in the journey. That would systematically over-weight channels that run more campaigns — which isn't a property of marketing effectiveness, it's a property of how many ad sets a marketer chose to run. ## Why this only happens under linear and time-decay Single-touch models — **first-click** and **last-click** — reconcile cleanly across channels and campaigns, because only one touch gets credit and that touch belongs to exactly one channel and exactly one campaign. - Under **last-click**, if Campaign B was the final ad-tagged touch, Campaign B gets the full $100 *and* Meta gets the full $100. - Sum of campaigns = $100. Meta channel = $100. They match. ✓ The non-reconciliation is unique to the **fractional** models (linear and time-decay), because they need to split credit somehow — and a $1 split four ways across four campaigns inside one channel is not the same as a $1 split two ways across two channels. ## How to think about it When you're comparing channel-level and campaign-level numbers, remember that **the underlying data is the same**. The same orders, the same customer journeys, the same touchpoints. What differs is which dimension we're collapsing on: - The **Sources** page collapses on **channel**. Meta is one column. - The **Campaigns** page expands every individual campaign into its own row. If you want the numbers to tie out exactly, look at them under **last-click** or **first-click**. Those are the lossless reconciliation models — every touch contributes to one channel and one campaign, and the rollups match. If you want to evaluate which **specific campaign** is pulling its weight inside Meta, use the campaign-level fractional credit on the **Campaigns** page. If you want to evaluate **Meta as a channel** against **Google as a channel**, use the channel-level fractional credit on the **Sources** page. Don't try to derive one from the other by summing the rows — the math doesn't work that way, and any tool that claims it does is quietly making the same trade-off and not telling you. ## This isn't a bug or a quirk Every multi-touch attribution tool collapses touches at the dimension you're rolling up to — they have to, otherwise channels with more campaigns systematically out-weight channels with fewer, regardless of actual performance. Most tools just don't surface the math. We do, because reconciling totals across dimensions is the single most common attribution-tool support question, and the honest answer is "they're not supposed to tie out under fractional models." ## Related reading - **Attribution models explained** — the four models Ordinary supports and what each one answers. - **Multi-touch vs single-touch attribution** — when to reach for fractional models vs single-touch. - **Channel taxonomy** — how Ordinary categorises traffic into channels.