Does Meta Steal Credit for Conversions?

Does Meta steal credit for conversions?

So this is a common complaint or claim I see about Meta’s conversion results in Ads Manager. The argument goes something like this.

You cannot trust Meta’s conversion results because they include conversions that Meta steals credit for. It includes results where someone saw your ad but was ultimately driven by Google. Or it includes results where someone clicked your ad but wasn’t convinced to buy until they acted on an email.

The suggestion is that you should only count the conversions where someone was inspired to click your ad, went to your website, and immediately converted. The rest are fluff and Meta stealing credit from other sources. Throw them out.

I saw someone refer to Meta’s conversion reporting as “vanity metrics” recently. Like views or follows or likes or clicks.

This feels lazy to me.

Attribution is messy, make no mistake about it. It attempts to simplify a complex system with a single data source.

It’s our job as advertisers to understand two things:

First, attribution is messy and imperfect. And second, not every reported conversion means that it resulted only from your ad.

Part of this is about understanding what attribution means.

If you want to assign credit, Meta deserves the most credit for click-through conversions. This means that someone clicked on your link prior to converting.

And if we’re to be even more specific, click-through conversions that happen within 1 day reflect the most intent. Otherwise, someone may have been driven by another channel eventually if the conversion doesn’t happen for a few days.

Engage-through conversions at least show interest. They clicked to like, comment, share, save, or engage with your video. But they didn’t click through to your website, so it’s very possible, if not likely, that another channel finished off the conversion.

And view-through conversions are the flimsiest of all. There was no click of any kind to verify that an impression was even seen to influence the purchase. But they converted within a day after that impression happened, which could have been purely coincidental.

Does Meta STEAL these conversions?

No.

These conversions happened. These impressions and clicks happened prior to the conversions.

You could make the same arguments about Google and other platforms. It’s our job to understand the meaning and context behind our results.

If you take your results at face value while they’re inflated with view-through conversions, that’s your own fault. That’s also probably why you obsess over remarketing strategies.

A smart advertiser understands that different conversions have different meanings.

You could take this further to discuss Meta’s First Conversion vs. All Conversions or Standard vs. Incremental Attribution. These are all Meta’s ways of giving us insight into the meaning of our conversion results, and we should use it.

But ultimately, this comes down to an important point that we’re missing.

Obsessing over which channel should get credit, whether it’s shared credit, or whether one channel is stealing credit misses the point.

Any effective campaign requires multiple contributing channels.

If your only focus is running ads, you’re limiting your overall growth potential.

Organic Facebook and Instagram efforts help. Having a presence on other social platforms will help. Website content, podcasts, and other ad platforms will help.

And all of these efforts will also increase the likelihood of organic referrals from Google, LLMs, and other websites.

All of your efforts effectively share credit for every conversion, and it doesn’t so much matter whether one channel gets 100% or 50% or 5% credit.

The main thing is that you know that the conversion happened and the person who converted was influenced by your ad in some way.

Whether the campaign was profitable and worthwhile is a separate exercise that you’ll need to figure out.

What is the conversion lift driven by your ads? The increased revenue?

And we shouldn’t always look only at direct revenue resulting from our ads, even when selling product.

What’s the customer lifetime value that resulted? Or maybe we’re building an email list or increasing awareness along the way.

Here’s the bottom of the glass.

Worry less about who deserves credit or how you assign credit for conversions.

Know what each type of conversion means. Know what your results mean.

And know how all of your various efforts on other channels influence your results, just as your ads influence results from those other channels.