> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://docs.moleculedata.com/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://docs.moleculedata.com/dashboards/live-today.md).

# Live Today

Real-time performance for today, with deep Meta and Google Ads drill-downs.

**Live Today** shows what is happening right now — it reads live data from your ad platforms, your store, and GA4 rather than the nightly-synced warehouse, so it's always current.

{% hint style="info" %}
Live Today is available as soon as you connect Shopify and at least one ad channel — even before completing onboarding or picking a plan. See [the FAQ](https://docs.moleculedata.com/faq/how-to-access-the-free-live-today-real-time-report) for details.
{% endhint %}

## Overview

* Toolbar: switch between **local timezone** and **UTC**, pick the reporting **currency**, and **refresh** on demand.
* Metric cards: **Total Sales, Net Sales, Orders, Sessions, Spend, Clicks, Impressions, ROAS, Net ROAS, Conversion Rate, AOV, Net AOV, CPO, CPC, CPM**.
* Per-channel sections show **Spend, Clicks, Impressions, CPC, CPM, Channel conversion, CPO, Channel conversion value, Channel ROAS** for each connected channel. The Facebook and Google sections expand inline with spend-by-hour, top ad sets/ads, demographics, and placements.

{% hint style="info" %}
**Net Sales** and **Net ROAS** here are today's money collected with tax and shipping taken out — the number that reflects what you actually keep. See [Net ROAS](https://docs.moleculedata.com/understanding-your-data/net-roas) for what it means, how to find your break-even, and why today's figure can differ slightly from the Dashboard's on a day with refunds.

**Channel ROAS** in the per-channel sections is what each ad platform reports about itself — see [Why your numbers don't match](https://docs.moleculedata.com/understanding-your-data/why-your-numbers-dont-match).
{% endhint %}

## Meta breakdown

A dedicated drill-down page for Meta (also linked in the sidebar). Pick any date range up to 90 days and compare against the previous period:

* Headline tiles with period-over-period deltas: **Spend, Impressions, Reach, Link clicks, Purchases, Purchase CPA, Conv. value, ROAS, Click CVR**.
* An **hourly spend** chart.
* Tabs: **Ad sets** and **Ads** (each row shows Spend, Impressions, Reach, Link clicks, Purchases, Purchase CPA, ROAS and Click CVR with deltas), **Demographics** (by age and gender), and **Placements** (with spend share).

## Google Ads breakdown

The Google drill-down covers four tabs:

* **Search & Display** — headline tiles with period-over-period deltas (**Spend, Impressions, Clicks, CPC, Conversions, CPA, Conv. value, ROAS**), spend by hour, top campaigns, ad groups, keywords, demographics, and placements.
* **Performance Max** — the same headline tiles for PMax campaigns, plus **performance by channel** and placement breakdowns that Google's own UI makes hard to see.
* **Keywords** — every keyword with impressions, clicks, CTR, average CPC, spend, conversions, CPA and ROAS, plus a **Health** assessment per keyword: **Wasted**, **Low QS**, **Losing to rank**, **Underbid**, **Low CTR**, or **Healthy**. Filter pills show **All / Struggling / Paused / Top spenders**, and you can **pause or activate keywords** directly from the table.
* **Search** — actual **search terms** for Search & AI Max campaigns (with cost and ROAS), and **search demand themes** for Performance Max.

## How the drill-down numbers are calculated

The drill-down pages read straight from the Meta and Google Ads APIs for the selected date range. A few of the metrics need explaining:

* **Deltas** compare the selected range with the equal-length period immediately before it. For example, a 7-day range is compared with the 7 days before it. A delta is not shown when the previous period has no value to compare against.
* **Delta colours** follow sentiment, not direction: green is good and red is bad. For cost metrics (**CPC, CPA, Purchase CPA**) a rise is shown in red because paying more per click or per conversion is the bad direction.
* **Impressions** are summed from the ad sets (Meta) or campaigns (Google) in the range, so the headline tile matches the sum of the rows.
* **Reach (Meta only)** is the number of unique people who saw your ads, reported by Meta per ad account for the whole range. Because it counts people rather than views, reach for individual ad sets or ads does **not** add up to the headline reach: the same person can be reached by several ad sets and is counted once at account level. If you have more than one Meta ad account connected, the headline reach is the sum across accounts, so someone reached by two accounts is counted once per account. When Meta cannot return reach for one of your accounts, the tile shows a dash rather than a partial number.
* **Google Ads has no Reach.** Google only reports unique users for Display, Video, Demand Gen and App campaigns, never for Search, Shopping or Performance Max, so the Google drill-down shows Impressions and Clicks instead.
* **CPC** is Spend divided by Clicks and **CPA** is Spend divided by Conversions (Google), while **Purchase CPA** is Spend divided by Purchases (Meta). They show 0 when there were no clicks, conversions or purchases in the period.