Refunds and settlement delay
A settlement delay of 0–60 minutes holds conversions briefly so an order cancelled straight away never reaches your ad platforms. For refunds after the fact, ConversionOS fires compensating events — a negative-value Purchase to Meta CAPI and a refund event to GA4.
Not every completed order stays completed. Without handling, cancellations and refunds leave your ad platforms optimising toward revenue that no longer exists.
Settlement delay
Set a delay of 0 to 60 minutes before a conversion is dispatched. If the order is cancelled or refunded within that window, the event is simply never sent — cleaner than sending it and correcting afterwards.
Choosing a delay
Match it to how quickly your cancellations actually happen. Most immediate cancellations occur within minutes, so 10–15 minutes catches the bulk. A longer delay means slower feedback to your ad platforms' optimisation.
Refunds after the window
For refunds that arrive later, compensating events are fired instead.
- Meta CAPI
- A negative-value Purchase event, so the reported revenue nets out.
- GA4
- A refund event, matching GA4's own e-commerce model.
Your own data stays intact
Raw conversion records are kept in AdProtektor regardless of what is sent onward, so your revenue reporting reflects reality even when a destination's view of it is corrected after the fact.
Frequently asked questions
Does a settlement delay hurt ad optimisation?
A short delay is negligible — ad platforms optimise over hours and days, not minutes. Sending revenue that later evaporates is the more damaging option.
What if a refund happens weeks later?
The compensating event still fires. How much a platform weights a very old correction is up to that platform.
Related articles
Events and the funnel
The full funnel ConversionOS captures, from page view to purchase, plus the Meta Standard Events it supports.
Delivery health and retries
Monitor whether your conversions are actually reaching each destination, with failure reasons, automatic retries and manual re-fire.
Conversion intelligence
Revenue, lifetime value, customer segments, attribution, funnel drop-off and cohort retention — built from your conversion data.
