Meta attribution in 2026: why your conversions dropped while nothing changed

January 2026: end of the 7- and 28-day view windows

Meta announced it on its developer blog on 16 October 2025: since 12 January 2026, the Ads Insights API no longer returns the 7-day view and 28-day view attribution windows.

The 1-day, 7-day and 28-day click, 1-day view and 1-day engaged-view windows remain available. Dashboards that relied on the removed windows therefore show fewer conversions, or empty fields.

March 2026: a click becomes a link click

On 3 March 2026, Meta announced that click-through attribution would only count link clicks for website and in-store conversions, to be more consistent with third-party tools such as Google Analytics.

Other interactions (shares, saves, other clicks) now fall under engage-through attribution, the new name for engaged-view attribution. The engaged-view threshold for video and Reels drops from 10 to 5 seconds. Meta states that billing does not change.

Incremental attribution

Meta also offers incremental attribution, which optimises delivery towards conversions caused by the ad, using models that predict whether a conversion would have happened without it. By design, it reports fewer conversions than standard attribution: the two numbers are not comparable.

How to reread your numbers

A few rules prevent bad decisions:

• Mark the change dates in your reports so you do not compare incomparable periods.
• Check each ad set’s attribution setting before comparing two campaigns.
• Reconcile Meta conversions with actual sales in the CRM or Google Analytics, by source.
• For major budget decisions, prefer a test with a holdout group.

What counts now, in plain terms

For a website conversion, there are now three cases:

• The person clicked the ad’s link: click-through attribution.
• They interacted in another way (share, save, video watched for at least 5 seconds): engage-through attribution.
• They only saw the ad: view-through attribution, on a one-day window.

An example

Illustrative example. Someone saves an ad without clicking the link, then buys three days later by typing the brand name. Under the old rules, that sale could be counted as a click-through conversion. Under the new ones, it leaves click-through attribution.

The sale did happen, and the ad may have contributed. It is the report that changed, not the customer’s behaviour.

Update your reports

A few checks prevent dashboards from being silently wrong:

• Find the reports and connectors that requested the 7- or 28-day view windows: they now return empty fields.
• Show engage-through attribution in a separate column from click-through attribution.
• Add an annotation on 12 January and March 2026 in charts.
• Recompute cost-per-result targets that were set with the old way of counting.

Explaining it to leadership

The message fits in one sentence: the conversions shown by Meta are an estimate of its contribution, not a count of sales. Rely on a number nobody disputes, the sales recorded in the CRM or in accounting, and show Meta’s figures as a trend indicator alongside it.

Questions