Meta Ads

Why Your Meta ROAS Is Wrong (And How to Find the Real Number)

Joey Sew · April 2026 · 8 min read

What does Meta ROAS actually measure?

Meta's reported ROAS measures the purchase value Meta claims to have driven, divided by the amount you spent. The operative word is "claims."

Meta claims a purchase whenever someone who saw or interacted with one of your ads then completed a purchase event on your website — within a defined attribution window.

As of March 2026, the default attribution setting for a Meta Sales campaign uses three separate attribution types:

• 7-day click-through — a conversion is claimed if someone clicked a link in your ad and purchased within seven days
• 1-day engage-through — a conversion is claimed if someone clicked a non-link element (like, comment, share, save) and purchased within one day
• 1-day view-through — a conversion is claimed if someone was shown your ad, did not click, and purchased within one day

Meta recently updated click-through attribution to require a genuine link click — previously any click on your ad, including social interactions, counted as a click-through conversion. That change tightened click-through attribution. But the view-through window remains the primary source of inflation for most ecommerce brands.

How view-through attribution inflates your ROAS — and when it doesn't

The 1-day view-through window means Meta claims a purchase if someone was shown your ad and then purchased anything from your store within 24 hours — even if they never clicked the ad.

Understanding when this is legitimate and when it inflates results is important.

Where view-through has genuine value: Prospecting campaigns reaching cold audiences. Someone sees your ad for the first time, doesn't click, but the impression plants a seed. They later Google your brand or product and purchase directly. Your ad contributed to that decision even without a click. View-through attribution is capturing something real here.

Where view-through reliably inflates results: Remarketing campaigns. If you are showing ads to people already on your email list, your past purchasers, or recent site visitors — these people already know you and have high purchase intent regardless of your ad. When a customer on your email list receives your newsletter on Monday, sees a retargeting ad in their feed, and then purchases after clicking the newsletter link — Meta claims that purchase as a view-through conversion. Your email drove the sale. Meta claimed it.

Jon Loomer, one of the most respected independent Meta advertising analysts, notes that remarketing campaigns will show a disproportionately high concentration in the 1-day view-through column, and many of those conversions would have happened regardless of whether the ad was shown.

At scale, across a large retargeting audience, this adds up to significant overclaiming.

The wholesale contamination problem

For brands that sell both direct-to-consumer online and via wholesale accounts, view-through inflation is compounded further.

Wholesale buyers — retailers, distributors, or bulk purchasers — browse your website, get cookied, and see Meta retargeting ads in their feed. When they place a large invoice order through your Shopify store within 24 hours of seeing an ad, Meta's pixel fires on the full wholesale order value and attributes it as a paid media conversion.

In one AU ecommerce account we audited — a kids' products brand selling both DTC and wholesale — Meta claimed AUD $244,188 in purchase value over 28 days. Shopify's Online Store channel recorded AUD $26,976 in net sales from the same period. The gap was almost entirely explained by view-through attribution on remarketing combined with wholesale order contamination.

Meta's reported ROAS was 42x. The actual blended ROAS against real Shopify revenue was 2.8x.

Why your agency might not flag this

Most paid media agencies are measured on the metrics the platforms produce. Their reporting decks pull from Meta Ads Manager. An agency reporting 42x ROAS is not lying — they are reading the number the platform provides.

They have little structural incentive to reconcile that number against Shopify, because doing so would show their results in a less favourable light. This is not malicious. It is a natural consequence of measurement being controlled by the platforms being measured.

Independent reconciliation requires someone in the business to own that process — or a tool built specifically to do it.

How to find your real ROAS

The real ROAS for your business requires only two numbers:

Shopify Online Store net sales ÷ total ad spend = blended MER

The Shopify Online Store channel specifically excludes wholesale, POS, and other non-DTC revenue. Use net sales, not gross — net accounts for refunds and returns.

Total ad spend is what you actually paid Google and Meta, found in your billing reports — not the conversion values the platforms report.

If your Shopify Online Store showed AUD $30,000 in net sales over 28 days and you spent AUD $11,000 across Google and Meta, your blended MER is 2.7x. That is the real number.

Everything else is a story the platforms are telling you about themselves.

What to do about it

Step 1: Turn off view-through attribution for remarketing campaigns. In your remarketing ad sets, change the attribution setting to remove 1-day view-through (set view-through to "none"). Your reported ROAS will drop. Your actual business performance will not have changed. Keep view-through on for prospecting campaigns targeting cold audiences — it has legitimate value there.

Step 2: Consider incremental attribution for higher-spend accounts. Meta introduced incremental attribution in 2025 — it attempts to only credit conversions genuinely caused by seeing or clicking your ad. For accounts spending AUD $30K+/month on Meta, test incremental attribution against your standard settings to see how much of your reported performance is genuinely incremental.

Step 3: Exclude wholesale customers from conversion events. Create a custom audience from your wholesale customer list and exclude them from conversion-optimised campaigns. For a cleaner fix, work with your developer to exclude wholesale orders from the pixel Purchase event entirely using Shopify order tags.

Step 4: Build a weekly reconciliation habit. Every Monday, pull Shopify Online Store net sales for the prior week and divide by total ad spend. This is your MER — Marketing Efficiency Ratio — and it is the only performance metric that cannot be manipulated by attribution settings.

Step 5: Use your Shopify number to evaluate spend decisions. When deciding whether to scale a Meta campaign, watch how your blended MER moves when you increase budget — not what Meta reports back.

The bottom line

Meta's ROAS figure is not a lie. It reflects a set of attribution rules that have legitimate uses in some contexts and produce significant inflation in others. View-through attribution is genuinely useful for measuring the impact of prospecting campaigns on cold audiences. It is a reliable source of overclaiming when applied to remarketing.

The brands that make the best media investment decisions are the ones who understand which attribution settings are appropriate in which context — and who anchor their overall performance scorecard to what Shopify actually recorded.

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