Understanding Attribution: Meta’s New Metrics for Better Ad Performance

Attribution across different platforms has always been a point of controversy for businesses to assess the impact of each contribution in their marketing mix. Whether reporting was from the business’s data or GA4, the results can still be distorted when compared to in platform data, due to differing attribution windows. Social platforms can be the hardest to attribute due to their separation from Google platforms and the different attribution standard settings, however, Meta are developing new reporting tools to increase platform accuracy.

Meta has introduced more advanced attribution settings to address discrepancies in data from the platform compared to backend reporting. Currently, ads manager counts all measurable conversions post ad click/view, but Meta have introduced options to filter by ‘All conversions’ and ‘First conversion’. ‘All conversions’ collects the data of every conversion that happened after an ad view or click, whereas ‘First conversion’ shows only the first conversion that happened after the ad view or click, which is why there will always be a higher number of results in ‘All conversions’.

This can also be combined with different ‘view’ & ‘click’ attribution windows, for example, you can compare between 1 day view and 7 day click from both an ‘All conversions’ and a ‘First conversion’ perspective.

This difference on conversion counts can show the biggest discrepancy with events that tend to happen multiple times after clicking an ad, such as engaged visits to a website, as people can view multiple pages on the website within the 7 day click period and every time the user returns to the website this will be counted in the ‘all conversions’ whereas the ‘first conversion’ will only count the initial website view. Or on a lead gen campaign this would ensure that multiple form submissions from the same person aren’t counted, as just the first form fill would be counted in the ‘first conversions’ metric, which would be a more accurate representation of the number of leads.

Similarly, when reporting on purchases, Meta would count the initial purchase and if they purchased again three days later it would also count this into purchases attributed to Meta when they may have seen a Google Search ad in between. The second purchase would then be reported by both platforms, therefore skewing the overall data. But with the new ‘first conversion’ metric this would only count the first purchase that can be directly attributed towards Meta.

Attribution updates demonstrate Meta’s ongoing efforts to deliver more precise reporting tools for advertisers to align ad platform data more closely to business data and GA4. It will make it easier to explain Meta’s direct contribution to results through the ‘first conversion’ data, when combined with the 1-day-click attribution. While this change will give us more insight on direct actions from interactions with our Meta ads, attribution is always going to be hard to distinguish and Meta’s halo effect in the user journey through  ‘all conversions’ is still a key metric in demonstrating the importance of the platform in the media mix.

Sources:

https://web.swipeinsight.app/posts/meta-rolls-out-major-update-to-attribution-settings

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bramvanderhallen/recent-activity/all/