Meta's Attribution Overhaul: What Marketers Should Do Next

You’ve likely seen the news over the past few weeks that Meta is overhauling its attribution settings.

This has sparked a lot of debate online about whether marketers should stick with standard settings like 7DC1DV or make the jump to Incremental Attribution (IA), with smart people like Barry Hott strongly advocating for IA.

Here are my $.02:

1. Meta's attribution changes may be bigger than just reporting

If the signal Meta picks up (the data point that says "this person clicked and then bought") has changed, your targeting has changed, and it is possible these attribution shifts are leading Meta to target different people. That means it's a good time to retest Meta overall, and validate whether these changes are just impacting your reporting or if they're fundamentally changing your performance.

2. It's a good time to test Incremental Attribution

For those unfamiliar, IA is Meta's optimization model trained on years of conversion lift studies. Instead of optimizing toward people who click and convert, it optimizes toward people whose conversions wouldn't have happened without the ad.

It's a genius product. Years ago, while everyone was arguing over whether incrementality mattered, Meta took a firm stance that it did and made conversion lift available for all advertisers. But even though they trained an optimization model on those CLS studies, it ironically might not be the best way to drive incremental outcomes yet. It’s new. But it will get better, and I’m certainly not betting against it.

3. How to settle the debates

You don't have to guess. There is an easy way to settle this for your specific brand: Run a lift test putting Incremental Attribution head-to-head against your current attribution settings (or run sequentially). If you don't have a third-party incrementality partner like Haus, Meta has very useful (and free) conversion lift products if you're just starting out on your journey.

The bottom line

Meta's attribution changes are worth paying attention to — not just for reporting, but because they may be changing who Meta targets. The best move is to stop debating and start testing. Run a lift test comparing Incremental Attribution against your current setup, either through a partner or Meta's own conversion lift tools.