What Attribution Setting Should You Use?

 This week's podcast question comes from PHC - Elite Member Beej Solomon.

Question:

"I'm wondering about attribution, whether it's better to use one day view, one day click, or just seven day alone. So what is the best setup for attribution?"

Answer:

This is a great question. Beej, and I hear this a lot. So this comes up when you create an ad set that utilizes the performance goal to maximize the number or value of conversions.

By default, the attribution setting is seven-day click, one-day view, and one-day engaged view. This applies to both delivery optimization and reporting, and it establishes how Meta will define a conversion. Seven-day click means that someone clicked your ad, whether on your link or not, and converted within seven days.

One-day view means that someone viewed your ad without clicking and converted within a day. And one day engaged view means someone watched your video and converted within a day. So in all these cases, Meta will credit an ad for a conversion. There are other settings too, and I'll get to that in a minute.

But my general rule of thumb is this. If you're selling something, stick with the default seven-day click, one-day view, and one-day engaged view. Because this conversion requires a financial investment, so it's reasonable that a purchase could take longer than a day to complete. That person may need to talk it over with their spouse or their business partner, or they just need to think it over.

It's also reasonable that Meta might take credit for a view-through conversion because someone could be shown your ad repeatedly, not click, Google your product, and then buy. So when you're selling something, you should normally stick with the default attribution setting.

But if you're giving something away for free or asking someone to complete a form, I almost always go with one day click. If someone clicks your ad for your free thing and doesn't immediately convert, they probably aren't that interested. And if they are, I don't really give your ad credit in that case. And they're also highly unlikely to view your ad without clicking and then Google you to subscribe to something for free. It's just not normal behavior.

So I recommend the default seven-day click, one-day view, one-day engage view for purchases, and one-day click only for virtually anything else. But there's one more exception, and that's when you're selling something and targeting a remarketing audience.

If you target the same people you email or who consume your content regularly elsewhere, Meta's gonna load up on view-through conversions. People will be served your ad and convert, but they may not have even seen your ad in the first place. But if they convert within a day because you reach them somewhere else, Meta takes credit for the conversion and makes your results look way better than they are. And Meta is gonna load up on that type of conversion.

While I rarely recommend remarketing these days for lots of reasons -- and you can listen to prior episodes about that -- there are always exceptions. If you have such an exception, remove the view through conversions.

And finally, there are a couple more attribution options these days in the ad set.

One is the incremental attribution model. By default, Meta uses Standard. Incremental is pretty new, and it's supposed to use advanced modeling to predict whether a conversion was caused by an ad. This should limit reporting, but it could conceivably improve quality. Now, I haven't had great experiences with it, and incremental attribution doesn't seem to do what I'd expect it to do. So I'd leave it at Standard unless you want to experiment.

The other option is conversion count, where you have the options of all conversions and first conversion. Do you wanna count all of the purchases that a person makes or just the first one? I think first conversion is valuable from a reporting perspective, but I just don't see a good use case for optimization.

Bottom line, stick with the defaults when you're selling something, but remove one-day view when you're remarketing. Otherwise, go with one-day click for virtually anything else, like a lead or free registration. So thanks, Beej, for your question.

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