Boost Your Google & Meta Ads With This Simple Change
This Is How You Avoid the Ad Attribution Trap
Are your ads working? Or is the ad platform telling you it’s working?
The truth lies in ‘attribution’ — But there is a trap to avoid here.
I’ll help you navigate it to save your ad budget from getting decimated.
First, Meta’s Attribution
Below is the attribution for 1 ad set with a 7-day click or 1-day view rule.
If you also use other marketing channels like email marketing, Google ads & TikTok for example, then this ad will be taking credit for sales that it didn’t produce.
It could even be counting sales from organic traffic or repeat buyers.
You don’t want this setting for your ads.
You want this instead…
Change the attribution settings to be 1-day click and to be charged ‘per click’ rather than per impression (where possible).
Meta does a good job at hiding these settings.
Under the conversion option, you want to select ‘show more options’
Then you want to hover over the attribution settings to change it…
You can see from that screenshot above, it was set to 7-day click — but when you change it, select 1-day click instead.
Keep in mind that they won’t allow you to change it for a published ad campaign, so you’ll need to start again to adjust these settings.
Check Your Google Conversion Data
Under the goals tab, you will see your conversion goals. In my case, all I care about is purchases.
Click on the blue text for your primary conversion action (in this case it’s Google Shopping App Purchase) inside your ad account — and it will open up for you to select the ‘settings’ tab.
You will see the settings for the click-through conversion window
I’ve seen it set as high as ‘90 days’ in the past. Which is gross and ridiculous.
If your company has any repeat business within that 90 days, then it could be misattributing those sales to Google campaigns.
The lowest you can set it to is 1 week. This is what I set mine to.
Google’s Attribution Choices
Under that last setting we changed is one called Attribution.
As you can see from the screenshot below, Google often has ‘data-driven’ as it’s recommended attribution model.
Last week on a phone call with a Google employee, they told me that Google decides the percentage of ‘credit’ it gives to their ads for each conversion.
So there’s no transparency here with this.
Your customer could see a Google ad & do nothing.
Then 4 days later, they could open your email about a different product (as they’re already subscribed to you), then buy that product — and Google would take credit for the ‘touch point’ as a conversion for them.
If you don’t want this to happen, select ‘Last Click’ from the dropdown, instead of Data-driven.
It counts the conversion for the ‘last’ / ‘most recent’ click that incentivised the customer to purchase… Which is a lot more fair on your marketing/ad budget.