Meta has rolled out an update to its Ads platform, introducing new attribution settings that promise to address a common frustration among advertisers: the misalignment between Meta ad data and backend numbers.

Historically, Meta’s ad reporting system counted all conversions a user made after clicking or viewing an ad. This meant that if a new customer made a purchase and then bought again two days later, Meta would take credit for both orders. This inflated the apparent performance of ads and skewed metrics like Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

To tackle this issue, Meta has introduced new attribution options:

• All Conversions: Shows every conversion that happened after an ad view or click.
• First Conversion: Shows only the first conversion that happened after an ad view or click.

Maurice Rahmey found that Meta was counting approximately 25% of non-first purchases towards new customers. This significant difference explained why many advertisers saw inflated numbers in their Meta Ads reporting compared to their backend data.