I had a campaign that generated some pretty amazing results.
- Amount Spent: $14.54
- Purchases: 29
- Cost Per Purchase: $.50
- Conversion Value: Over $13,000
- Return On Ad Spend: Over 900
Sounds crazy, right? Yeah, it is. Because it’s fake. Here’s what happened…
The Explanation
As much as I wanted to take credit for these results, I immediately knew what happened. This campaign was running while I was making updates to my purchase confirmation pages. Lots of them.
Because I’m a regular visitor to my own website, my ads were shown to me. And because my ads were shown to me, every time I loaded a confirmation page, it fired my purchase event and a conversion was attributed to my ad.
While this example of inflated results was easy to spot, it’s not always so obvious. If you have results that you can’t explain, it’s often due to internal admin traffic. If it’s not you, it could be someone on your team.
You are likely to see your own ads. It doesn’t matter that you don’t click them. If you’re loading confirmation pages on that same day, conversions will be attributed to your views.
Your Job
This isn’t Meta cheating. It’s attribution working exactly the way it should, but a weird case that will throw off results.
It’s your job to either prevent or detect it.
