Your Meta Ad Results Are About To Change!

0:00The results you see in your Meta ad account are about to change because Meta has recently made a big change to attribution. In this video, I'm going to explain what's actually changing and how it impacts you as a Meta advertiser. So, to explain the changes that are happening, I first need to go over what attribution looked like previously, then I can talk about the changes and that'll give us context on what we're likely to see going forward in terms of how this is going to impact our results. So, previously, the default attribution setup, if you created say a lead campaign or a sales campaign, was 7-day

0:29click-through and 1-day view-through attribution. What that meant is that if someone clicked on your ad and then converted within 7 days, provided obviously Meta was able to track that conversion, that would appear as a result within your ad account, or if someone viewed your ad but didn't click and then converted within 1 day, within 24 hours, then that would count as a

0:48conversion uh within your ad account. Now, in some instances, you were able to change the that attribution window, so change the the time frames, you could change to 1-day click, for example. Uh you could remove the view-through um conversions from going through and people would do that to try and get a more accurate sense of how their campaigns are actually performing and and improve their their data quality. Um but that was kind of the the default setup. Now, one of the things that not many advertisers understood was what actually counted as a click when it came to click-through attribution. They assumed it meant you had to uh there had

1:19to be a link click involved, and that wasn't true. Meta was including any click on the ad. That could be a like or another type of reaction, could be a comment, could be a share, um could be clicking uh to read more of the primary text, which is a long primary text, could be clicking in to watch more of the video. So, Meta would include those what we'll call social and media clicks as clicks that would then trigger a potential 7-day time period for a conversion to be attributed within that

1:497-day uh default click-through window. And that led a lot of advertisers to misinterpret the results they were seeing cuz if they assumed that these were only um link clicks that would then turn into a a a click-through attributed conversion, and that wasn't the case. And for a lot of advertisers, that feels more like a view-through attribution. Yes, they were served an ad. Yes, they saw it. Yes, they engaged with it, but they didn't actually click on the link and come through. Maybe they uh there was another piece of marketing that got the conversion instead. Maybe it was a they were on my email list and they saw

2:20an email. Maybe they saw an ad on a different platform. Maybe they remembered the brand name and searched organically and came through it that way. We know that uh prospect and customer journeys aren't always see ad, click on ad, purchase. See ad, click on ad, become a lead, right? There are other influencing factors, particularly if you're marketing across multiple

2:40channels. Quick one before we continue. If you're running Meta ads and you'd like me to take a look at your actual ad account and tell you what I would change, test, or scale, I've built something called the Ben Heath Inner Circle. Inside, you get direct access to me for less than $60 per live session, where you can join, ask me questions, and even share your ad account for live feedback. And these sessions are scheduled across multiple time zones, so you can join from wherever you are in the world. So, if you're dealing with performance dropping, creatives not working, or you're unsure how to scale, you can bring it to a live session and

3:10we'll go through it together. If you want to check it out, there's a link in the video description. Let's get back to the video. So, the first big change to attribution is that that click-through attribution definition is changing. So, going forward, Meta is not going to include those social and media clicks. It for In order for someone to count as a click-through attributed conversion, the ad you need to click on a link. Now, that doesn't mean they're clicking to somewhere external. It could well do and will in most instances be someone's clicking through to um a website or a landing page, wherever you're sending people, but it could also

3:41be an internal click. Let's say your lead campaign is sending people to your Instagram profile first because you know that you can convert very well there, um or they're clicking into WhatsApp, for example. So, any basically any click, the main destination that you've set from um the ad that you've created, whether that's internal within a Meta app or external, your website, landing page, etc., that is what people are going to need to do in order to qualify as a click-through attributed conversion going forward. And if you think that's not a big deal because you're thinking, "Well, surely the vast majority of the clicks that take place on my ads are

4:14link clicks," let me show you some data that would demonstrate the opposite. So, here we've got some campaigns that we've run in one of our our ad accounts, and you can see we've got this column here, right? Link clicks. You can see that top campaign's got 415 link clicks, but clicks all, which would include those social and media clicks, 1,179. So, literally almost three times as many clicks as link clicks. Similar story for the campaign uh beneath it. Uh there's more in these two campaigns down below all clicks than there are link

4:46clicks, but the ratio's different. Interestingly, that's because these top two campaigns are very video heavy, and these bottom two campaigns where the discrepancy is less are more image heavy. So, how much this impacts you will depend on the type of creative you're using. If it's video, then you're going to get a lot of people clicking in to watch more of the video, right? And you can see we're running here in these two campaigns at the top at close to three times as many clicks to to link clicks. So, all those clicks that previously would have then potentially triggered a click-through attributed conversion, that's not going to be

5:15taking place anymore. So, you might see a significant [clears throat] difference in the results in your Meta ad account simply from that alone. Okay, so let's have a quick little think about the ramifications of this first change before we get into the other changes. So, firstly, your results that you see in Ads Manager align more closely with any third-party tracking or Google Analytics that you've got set up because most external tracking systems are going to use a last click attribution model, and this is going to be more similar to that than it has been previously, potentially. I've spoken with lots of advertisers that are frustrated that say Google Analytics is

5:49demonstrating very different results than what they're seeing within Ads Manager, and that's because Google Analytics is only counting uh last click conversions, whereas Meta is including conversions after these social or uh media clicks. It's also counting view-through conversions and and stuff like that as well, right? That Google Analytics is not going to count, but that's why. And over the years, I've tried to calm advertisers down about that by explaining that we often can't attribute any particular conversion to one marketing channel 100% because they overlap and they interact, and that's

6:20not how customer journeys work, right? If you think about let's say someone is served an ad on Facebook or Instagram. They see a product, they really like it, they come through, they click, they come through to the website, but they don't purchase. They forget about it. Few weeks later, friend makes a recommendation for that brand. They go and check them out again. They sign up to the um email list. This is tracked by the pixel. Retargeting ads are put in front of them. They see those, maybe click, maybe don't. They remember the brand name, they're sent emails for a while, they decide, "Actually, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and buy that." They

6:50search for the brand name in Google, come through to the website, and make a purchase. Well, in Google Analytics, for example, or some sort of third-party tracking, that conversion is going to be attributed to organic. But if they were served an ad within the last 24 hours or they clicked on an ad within the last um 7 days, again depending on your your attribution window that you've got set up, then Meta's going to say, "Hey, we had a hand in that conversion. It's going to go in the results column." So, that's that's a little bit of a tangent there. That's part of the reason why um

7:15there's never going to be 100% um like similarity between the results you see within Ads Manager and the results you see within other third-party tracking, Google Analytics, where they're going to try and attribute each conversion to one platform, which is unrealistic for the most part. Um but with this change, we're likely to see more similarity between those two. And and I think that'll be helpful for a lot of advertisers. We may also see I touched on this second ago, but we may also see less conversions reported. Now, this is going to impact some advertisers more than others. It's going to depend

7:49um on whichever settings you're using. Are you using the default 7-day click-through, 1-day view-through, or have you gotten rid of the view-through and just gone with 1-day click-through, for example? That's going to they're going to impact it. The other thing that's really going to impact this is your sales cycle. Is what you're selling or what you're advertising something that people can quick and easily click through and either sign up and become a lead or make a purchase, or is it more of an involved decision and people are going to take time? If it's the latter, you're more likely to see a larger discrepancy in what you have been seeing

8:19results-wise and what you're going to see going forward because if people are engaging with your video ads, for example, but not necessarily clicking on the link and then buying 5 days later, if they don't click on the link, that's no longer going to count as a conversion, whereas it would have um previously. Hyros is the best tracking

8:35and attribution software for Meta ads. It's a software all the big players in this industry use, including myself. I use it to track results for my own ads as well as all my organic results as well. So, if someone books a call for our done-for-you services, for example, I can see exactly where that person came from with a lot of accuracy. That allows me to make better decisions for my marketing and my business. Hyros has been able to track that from our ad spend in this campaign, we've generated 96,000 pounds, but 58,000 pounds of that was not reported by Meta. So, if I was just looking at my data within my Meta

9:05ad account, I might come to the conclusion that this campaign is doing okay, but in reality, this campaign is doing a lot, lot better. Now, this is a relatively extreme example because of the nature of our business, so most of our product services have a recurring billing element. Meta might be able to see what we make initially from our ad spend on that initial transaction, but not those subsequent payments, and that's why it it shows the importance here of being able to accurately see what we actually get from our ad spend in order to be able to make better decisions and optimize correctly. So, if you want to improve the performance of

9:35your ad campaigns without having to touch your ads, go ahead and sign up to Hyros. There is a link in the video description. So, the other big change that's happening to attribution is the creation of a new attribution category called engage-through attribution. And that's going to be the new home for what was previously included under click-through attribution, the things we've been talking about, so those social and media clicks. So, if you think about we've now got the three options and sort of sit on a spectrum, right? We've got click-through attribution, so someone needs to click on the link and then go ahead and convert to be counted within that. Then

10:06we've got engage-through attribution, which is going to be likes, reactions, comments, shares, clicking into the video to watch the media, clicking into see more and read the full primary text on certain placement options. So, those are social and media clicks. Now, in order to count under engage-through attribution, those people need to have not also clicked on the link cuz as soon as they do that, they would then fall under the click-through attribution should they go ahead and convert. And then we've still

10:31got view-through attribution as well. So, that's where someone has viewed an ad, impression has been generated, but they haven't taken any of the other actions. They haven't engaged with it and they haven't clicked on a link, so they count as as view-through. So, let me show you what this looks like. Now, I'm in one of our example ad accounts that has got these new attribution settings. As of the recording of this video, not all ad accounts have it, but

10:52it is being rolled out quite quickly. You may or may not have it yet. This is how you check to see if you've got it. So, to demonstrate this, I've created a quick example leads campaign, but these new attribution settings will apply to other campaign objectives as well. Really important that you that you understand that. And the way you check, come into the ad set level and then scroll down where you've got into this attribution section beneath attribution model, we've got this show more options button. Click on that and you can see we've literally got here introducing engage-through attribution, right? And then we can click in here and

11:22we can see we've got the three settings. We've got click-through 7 days, we can change that to 1 day. Engage-through 1 day, we can change that to none. You can see Meta is very much recommending you don't do that. And then we've got view-through 1 day again, we can change that to none. I'm normally a fan of leaving these to be as big as possible cuz I want as much conversion data as possible. I want Meta to be able to learn. I want to get out of learning phase. I want us as advertisers to have more data with which to optimize. The reason why people would often shrink

11:50these, so go with say 1 day click and maybe remove the others, is if they are running, let's say, other marketing channels, big email marketing campaign, people are also being served Meta ads at the same time and they feel like their results are overinflated when it comes to what they're seeing in Ads Manager, and so they can come in and remove these and and potentially improve that. But, I wouldn't recommend doing that by default. I go with the default, which is the longest one. One quick thing actually I should mention hovering over engage-through that I haven't mentioned so far. I've talked about the social and the media clicks counting as

12:22potential engage-through conversions. someone converts. Also, we've got video views. So, engage-through is counted when a video is played for at least 5 seconds or for 97% of its total length if it's shorter than 5 seconds. So, something that's really important there to to notice as well that someone can watch a video for more than 5 seconds, they will count as an engage-through conversion if they go on to convert as opposed to a view-through conversion, which again, if you're not aware of that part, you would assume that that's just going to become

12:49a view-through view-through conversion. And what this is going to give us as Meta advertisers is a lot more granularity and specificity over what's happening and what are our customers actually doing before they convert. And once you've got this in place and you've run campaigns using these attribution settings, you're going to be able to take a look at your data by the different attribution. So, how much is actually click-through, how much is engage-through, how much is view-through? I'll show you how to do that quickly. Now, to have a look at that data, you can do it campaign, ad set, or ad level, but you want to come

13:19into breakdown and then go ahead and click on attribution settings. And we can see that for this campaign, for example, of the 37 website schedules generated, 29 are 1-day click, two to seven sorry, three are two to seven-day click, and five come from 1-day click. We've got no engage-through. Now, this is under the old setup. These are the old attribution settings. I'm going forward, I would expect this 1-day click and potentially this two to seven-day click number to decrease and instead see more engage-through conversions. This is still the old setup because this is changes happening right now. We haven't had a chance to run campaigns under the new settings to then

13:56be able to to demonstrate it. So, you can see we've still got engage-through, which is like an older version. We've now got engage-through to replace it. And like I said, the conversions being attributed to clicks is likely to decrease with this change. Hopefully, you now understand why. Now, one thing I want to quickly mention that's really important about this is that once you get these attribution settings within your ad account and once you start using them, you may well see a drop in reported conversions. Really important to check your back-end data to see if that's actually true or if it's just you're not generating you're not seeing as many

14:29conversions show up in your ad account. So, don't compare old campaigns to newer campaigns and think, "Ah, they're performing worse." It might just be the difference in attribution settings because what we're going to miss going forward are those conversions that take place two to seven days after a social or media click. For some businesses, that's going to be a really small number, might not see much of a difference. For others, it might be a lot more significant. So, just factor that in and always check your back-end

14:55data. Don't just jump to conclusions. And attribution settings are not the only things that have changed when it comes to Meta ads recently by any means. For example, we have completely reworked our retargeting strategy and I demonstrate it in detail in this video here. With the changes that we've seen to Meta ads, we've had to update how we do retargeting. It looks completely different from what we used to do a couple of years ago. So, if you haven't already, give this a watch and update

15:19your retargeting strategy, too.