Meta’s default reporting takes credit for guests who saw an ad and booked anyway — re-slice your account to click-only attribution before you scale a number that isn’t real.
Default Meta attribution counts a purchase if someone merely saw your ad within a day and booked — including your own past guests who were booking anyway. Retargeting campaigns aimed at warm audiences can look spectacular while creating almost nothing.
In Ads Manager, use the attribution-setting comparison to view purchases and ROAS on 7-day-click (no view) alongside the default. Ad sets already configured for click-only attribution report the truth natively; for the rest, the comparison view is your audit. The scale of the reveal is real: we’ve watched two sister accounts show 170:1 versus 25:1 on default attribution — and collapse to a modest 2:1 difference once compared click-only. Watch the export trap too: scheduled report exports quietly revert to view-inclusive defaults.
Real (click-only ROAS still clears your bar), inflated (default looked great, click-only doesn’t), and unknown (too little data). You will usually find at least one “hero” ad set that was mostly taking credit for organic rebooking.
Make 7-day-click the standing configuration for new prospecting builds so future reporting is honest by default. Keep one eye on view-through as a directional signal — it isn’t worthless, it’s just not revenue.
Shift spend from inflated ad sets into the ones whose click-only economics work. This is the audit’s payoff: same budget, more actual bookings.
Run the contenders — dynamic catalog, static retargeting, featured carousel — concurrently for ~30 days and let click-attributed bookings pick the winner. Concurrent beats sequential; seasonality can’t put its thumb on the scale.
Publish both numbers once, with the language that keeps them straight: “driven by Meta” for click-attributed bookings, “influenced by Meta” for view-through. “Meta says 12x; click-only says 7x; we scale on the 7.” It’s a harder conversation once — and every scaling decision afterward gets easier and righter. Sanity-check the number you scale on against OTA parity: break-even against a 15.5% commission is about 6.5:1, so a click-only 4x is a 25% cost of acquisition — below parity, a fix-the-funnel signal, not a scale signal.
Open Ads Manager, add the attribution comparison to your main report, and screenshot the default-vs-click-only gap. That screenshot sets your next budget meeting’s agenda.
This is the exact kind of work we do for vacation rental brands every day. Bring us the property mix and the market — we’ll bring the system.
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