Attribution on Tiendanube and Mercado Libre: what you can and cannot measure

I sell on Tiendanube and on Mercado Libre. What can I actually measure about the sales my ads produce on each one?

Tiendanube and Mercado Libre are where a large share of Mexican online stores sell, often both at once, and they sit at opposite ends of the measurement problem. On Tiendanube the store is yours, the platform does much of the tagging for you, and the gaps are specific. On Mercado Libre the page, the checkout and the customer relationship belong to the marketplace, and the gap is structural. This guide covers what each lets you measure, where the limits are and how to approximate what you cannot measure directly.

Tiendanube: what you can measure

Tiendanube measures through native integrations rather than code you paste. What its help center documents, read on September 25, 2026:

• Meta. Connecting your Meta business portfolio installs the pixel and, according to Tiendanube's help center, turns on Meta's Conversions API automatically, from the store's back end. The pixel receives seven events: PageView, ViewContent, AddToCart, InitiateCheckout, Purchase, Search and ViewCategory.
• Google. Google Ads connects through the Google Shopping integration, which creates the conversion actions for you, and GA4 connects with a Measurement Protocol secret that lets Tiendanube send conversions from its back end (GA4 integration).
• TikTok. A native TikTok Ads integration exists, which Tiendanube says is available only for stores in Mexico and Chile.

Decide when a purchase counts

Tiendanube fires Meta's Purchase event from its own system and lets you choose between two moments: when the order is marked as paid, or when the checkout is completed whether or not the payment was confirmed (events Tiendanube sends to the pixel). In Mexico the choice matters more than it looks: with cash payments at convenience stores and bank transfers, a completed checkout is often a promise, not a sale. Counting on payment keeps Meta's number closer to your settled orders; counting on checkout gives Meta a faster, larger and less accurate signal.

Use one source of conversions per platform

Tiendanube's own guidance is to activate a single source of conversions for Google Ads, either GA4 imported into Ads or the native integration, never both, and not to duplicate through Google Tag Manager the events the native integration already sends (how Google Analytics, Ads and Tag Manager work together). The same logic applies to Meta: a Purchase added by hand on top of the integration counts the sale twice. We cover how to spot that in how to tell if the same purchase is counted twice.

Tiendanube: the limits

Two limits shape everything else.

No free-form tracking code. Tiendanube removed its two tracking-code fields, one for the store and one for the checkout, from March 3, 2024 (Tiendanube's notice). Since then a tool that is not a native integration reaches your store through Google Tag Manager, which the free plan does not include, or through an app registered with permission to add a script to the storefront, as Tiendanube's developer documentation describes.

The order does not say where the buyer came from. The order object in Tiendanube's API carries the buyer's contact details, the browser's IP address and user agent, and where the order was created (the storefront, an order imported from Mercado Libre, the API, a draft order or a point of sale), but no field for the campaign, the UTM tags or the landing page. So the channel of an order is known only if a tag captured it during the visit and something stitched the two together; the order record alone cannot answer it.

That leaves the usual problem of any store, only sharper: Meta and Google each report the sales they credit to themselves, and nothing on the order side reconciles them. The reconciliation has to be built from sessions and orders, the same way it is on WooCommerce or VTEX.

Mercado Libre: what you can and cannot measure

On Mercado Libre the listing, the checkout and the payment are Mercado Libre's, not yours, so your own Meta, Google or TikTok tags do not run where the sale happens. If you send ad traffic to your listings, the ad platforms can report the clicks and the visits they sent, and nothing after that: the purchase happens on a page they cannot see.

What you can measure inside the marketplace is Mercado Libre's own advertising. Mercado Ads documents its attribution as 100% of the credit to the last click on a related ad within the 14 days before the purchase or, with no click, to the last impression within the previous 24 hours, and it keeps counting conversions until the 14-day window closes after a campaign ends (Mercado Ads attribution). That is a platform crediting itself, like any other, and it only sees ads inside Mercado Libre.

The two can claim the same sale without either one knowing about the other. A shopper who clicks your Instagram ad, lands on your listing, leaves, then comes back through a Mercado Libre ad and buys is a Mercado Ads conversion; Meta saw a click and nothing more.

If your Tiendanube store imports your Mercado Libre orders, the API marks them with their own origin, so you can separate marketplace orders from web orders in any report. Keep them separate: a Mercado Libre sale inside your web store's totals makes your web channels look better than they are.

How to approximate the real impact

Where a sale cannot be tracked, it can still be estimated. Three methods that work with the data you already have:

• Compare periods. Change the outside spend pointed at your listings in a planned way, for example by pausing it for two weeks or doubling it, and compare total Mercado Libre sales against the weeks before and the same weeks of the previous year.
• Split by region. Run the outside ads in some states and not others, and compare sales by the buyer's state if your sales export includes the shipping address. It is the simplest version of an incrementality test, which we explain in attribution vs. MMM vs. incrementality.
• Watch what outside ads leave behind. Searches for your brand and visits to your listings tend to move with your outside campaigns even when the sales cannot be tied to them.

Where Adray fits

Adray connects to the platforms listed on its integrations page: Shopify, WooCommerce, VTEX and Magento today. It does not have a Tiendanube app, and no tool outside Mercado Libre can see a Mercado Libre checkout. If you sell on a supported platform and on Mercado Libre, Adray reconciles your web store's orders against what each ad platform claims, and your marketplace sales stay a separate line, estimated with the methods above.