Accurate referrer data from facebook and instagram

[wheeleran]

Bit of a weird one, and i have no idea how to understand it. I self-host an instance of Plausible side by side with Umami, and i'm getting widly different data from a cheap little ad i've just run on Meta, targetting just France and Germany, sending visitors to a specific landing page. Now, I know Plausible and Umami have different ways of showing page views/unique visitors, but accounting for that i'm still getting differences i can't understand. After drilling down into various filters, it looks like Plausible ins't recording referrals, and therefore visits, from Instagram. On a specific two day period Umami tells me it got 20 unique visitors from Instagram. 10 from Germany, 8 from France, 2 from Italy. Plausble records 1 referral, from France, for the same period.

It gets weirder when looking at data for the landing page over the week of the ad. Total page views are the same, but Umami divides them roughly half and half from Instagram and Facebook, but Plausible says all page visits were from Facebook. Not a single one from Instagram.

I don't know what to do with this, and damn me for running two analytics and comparing them, but can anybody give me some idea or explanation for what might be going on?