How Meta Changed Attribution

Here’s how Meta changed attribution.

Meta recently made a big and long awaited change to attribution. It should absolutely be for the better, but there might be a negative impact for some advertisers. I’d argue that even the potential negative impact is a good thing.

So let’s talk about what changed and why it matters.

Back in 2024, I stumbled on something that was honestly kind of shocking related to click attribution. It started with a question from a reader who wanted to know whether click attribution included conversions that happened after clicks that weren’t on a link.

For example, if someone only liked your post, commented, shared, saved, or made any other click other than on a link and then converted, would it be counted under click attribution?

At the time, Meta’s definition of click-through attribution was vague, so I couldn’t say for sure. I still assumed it would require a click on a link, but I ran a test to verify. And oh man, I would be surprised.

I created an ad that only utilized a static image. The ad included explicit instructions to click the image and then separately go to a specific page of my website. Understand that there was not a hyperlink anywhere. Clicking the image stayed on the platform.

When they separately went to the page I told them to go to, a conversion event would fire.

My assumption was that these would be view-through conversions. But Meta reported more than 20 conversions, and ALL of them were reported as click-through.

Eventually, Meta would update the definition of click-through conversion to clarify that any click on your ad was enough. While it was good this was clarified, it still made no sense that these other clicks would be counted that way.

And that brings us to the changes.

Click-through attribution now requires a click on a link. That kicks out conversions resulting from social clicks including likes, reactions, comments, shares, and saves. And it also kicks out all other clicks that weren’t on a link.

Now, most of these conversions won’t be lost. They’re moving to a new attribution called Engage-Through.

Engage-through replaces engaged-view. Engaged-view previously only covered the situation where someone viewed your video for at least 5 seconds before converting.

The new engage-through will include those engaged-view, but also all of the social clicks and other clicks that result in a conversion.

The best way to understand this is that if someone clicks on a link and then converts, it will be counted as a click-through conversion. If they make any other click and convert, it falls under engage-through.

This is all much more logical, and it’s a good move.

Assuming you keep the new engage-through attribution checked in the ad set, I don’t expect most advertisers to notice a difference. I doubt many conversions were reported from social clicks in the first place, but most of those would move to engage-through.

The one exception will be any conversion that happens more than a day after a social or other click. While click-through attribution has a 7-day default window, engage-through is only 1 day. That means that those conversions that happen between 2 and 7 days after the click will be lost.

Like I said, I doubt many of these conversions were happening anyway, but there is one strategy that is likely to be hit the hardest.

REMARKETING.

This is the prime scenario when such a conversion could be reported. Imagine you are only targeting people on your email list. Someone sees your ad and likes it or provides a comment for support. Three days later, they get an email from you about this thing and they act on the email.

Such a scenario would have resulted in a reported conversion before, but it won’t now because it fell beyond the 1-day window.

Remarketing strategies are propped up primarily by view-through conversions, but we can’t ignore the impact of this other type of conversion. I also assume that such campaigns will see more engage-through conversions going forward.

It’s absolutely something to watch.

So here’s the bottom of the glass.

Click-through attribution has changed, and for the better. Meta now requires a click on a link for a conversion to be counted under click-through attribution.

The social clicks and other clicks that were previously counted under click-through have moved to a new engage-through attribution.

But because engage-through is only 1-day while click-through defaults to 7 days, that means that some conversions will be lost.

While I don’t expect this to impact many advertisers, it’s most likely to hurt results for those running remarketing campaigns.

I’ve long warned against accepting inflated results from remarketing, and this could provide a wakeup call.

Make sure to use the compare attribution settings feature and breakdown by attribution setting to see how this plays out.

For more on these changes, read my blog post at jonloomer.com/click.