New Definition for Click Attribution

Meta finally updated their definition of Click Attribution.

Let’s break down the timeline, and what actually changed.

The Old Definition

About a year ago, I shared how ambiguous Meta was about click attribution. The old definition read like this…

Click-through attribution: A person clicked your ad and took an action.

At the time, it would have been easy to assume that this was a click on an ad link. The problem was that Meta didn’t say either way, whether it included all clicks or just some clicks.

My Test

I ran a test that proved that it was all clicks. I created a static image ad with instructions on it to click my image and separately go to a specific page of my website that would fire a unique event.

Meta only reported click conversions.

In other words, the click on the static image counted.

The New Definition

It was good to finally have that figured out all these years later, but Meta’s definition was still bound to confuse people. Well, not anymore.

I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but it was some time during the past several months. Meta’s definition of click attribution now it reads like this…

Click-through: Counts results after any click occurred on your ad within 1-day or 7-days of an optimized conversion. Clicks may include interactions such as likes, shares and saves.

That’s way clearer now. Meta articulates that it’s ANY click, and includes specific examples (strangely that doesn’t even include a click on a link, but that’s at least implied this time).

It’s Still Annoying

This is nice. But it’s still annoying. I hate that click attribution includes any click. It doesn’t make any sense.

If someone clicks somewhere on your ad but isn’t driven to your website, any reported conversions are no more valuable than a view-through. And you can’t separate these from other click-through conversions that actually happened as a result of clicking on a link.

I’ll keep complaining about this. Either allow us to separate these conversions from clicks on links or move non-link clicks to view-through.

Side Note

Whenever this is discussed, some confident and strongly opinionated folks love to jump in and say that this has always been obvious because All Clicks isn’t the same as Outbound Clicks or Landing Page Views; and CTR or CPC (All) include clicks other than clicks on links. I’ve been talking about this for a decade (here, here, and here). You’re missing the point.

It’s very different when we’re talking about attribution. There aren’t three types of click attribution. There’s one. It was either Click or View. And because of that… I’m wasting my time, never mind. This will happen regardless.