Is advertising on social media part of your company's online marketing strategy? Then you are probably familiar with Meta's notorious attribution model, where every conversion was attributed to your Meta ads. Yes, you read that right… This is a thing of the past! Meta has introduced an important update regarding the attribution model, allowing you to gain insight into only the first conversions after viewing or clicking on your Meta ad.
Let's get started… Keep reading to gain more insights into this new statistic within Meta ad management, which is extremely valuable for providing more context to reported conversions.
How do I gain insight into First Conversions?
Click on the “Columns” button in Meta ad management (the menu on the left to “Specification” and “Reports”):
At the bottom, you can select “Compare Attribution Settings”:
If this update is available to you (unfortunately, it has not yet been rolled out to everyone), the “Compare Attribution Settings” menu should look like this:
With this new feature, you can generate extra columns for each attribution model: Click, View, and Engaged-view. This way, you can see how your reported conversions are distributed across the available view and click attribution windows. Once you select one of those attribution models, you get the new options for conversion counts:
By default, this is set to “All conversions,” but now you also have the option to select “First conversion” or “Both”! Understandably, you might think: It's nice that this option is there, but…
What exactly are First Conversions?
Well, Meta's definition is confusing if you take it literally:
“First conversion includes only the first measurable conversion that occurs after someone views or clicks on your ad.”
Here's an example to clarify this. After clicking on an ad from a webshop, a person performs the following conversions in order over a period of seven days after the click (measurable within Meta's attribution model):
- Content views Custom conversion (1 minute on the page)
- Add to cart
- Content views Custom conversion (1 minute on the page)
- Add to cart
- Initiated checkout
- Purchase
- Content views Add to cart
- Initiated checkout
- Purchase
You might interpret Meta's definition as only counting the first conversion “Content views” because it was the first conversion. Fortunately, that's not the case ๐
Instead, only the first individual conversion within the attribution window is counted. For our example, All Conversions would be reported as follows…
- Content views: 3
- Custom conversion (1 minute on the page): 2
- Add to cart: 3
- Initiated checkout: 2
- Purchase: 2
If you used First Conversion, it would be reported as follows…
- Content views: 1
- Custom conversion (1 minute on the page): 1
- Add to cart: 1
- Initiated checkout: 1
- Purchase: 1
How this affects your results depends greatly on the type of business you have. The types of conversions most likely to be affected are those that occur multiple times. Different independent purchase events generally occur much more frequently in a webshop than in a company offering training or services.
The biggest difference you will likely see is between engagement-based conversions. Examples include “Content views,” “Add to cart,” and “Initiated checkout.” Differences will also become visible for custom conversions, such as a certain time on the page or achieving a certain scroll depth.
How can I apply First Conversions myself?
Gaining insight into First Conversions is a tool to add extra context to your Meta ad reports. Don't see it as a replacement for All Conversions, just as you shouldn't see 1-day click as a replacement for the standard 7-day click and 1-day view attribution. This new update gives you extra data to better understand what your results actually mean.
Above is an example: From the campaigns, 695,111 Content views were registered within the 7-day click attribution window, but only 388,562 of these are First Conversions. When you look at the 1-day view attribution window, you see a total of 116,685 Content views, of which only 44,996 are First Conversions. What you can conclude from this is that people who click on your ads view an average of 1.8 products on your website within 7 days, while people who only saw your ad view an average of 2.6 products within 1 day.
When it comes to purchases, you cannot ignore the All Conversions view. If one person made five separate purchases within your attribution window, the initial engagement with your ad contributed to all five purchases. You don't want to ignore this in the report. By adding the First Conversion to this, you get useful context. Instead of five customers, you have one, but that one customer bought a lot!
Are you taking control of your results?
Making First Conversions insightful is an extra tool that can help you optimize your campaigns. It gives you the extra measurability and flexibility you need to be successful in a competitive market. Want a clear and action-oriented picture? Then together we pave the way to success! Contact us today.
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