Your ROAS is lying to you

Helloooo Haveaclues!

If you’ve been following me for a while, you already know:

Meta’s attribution system can make your ads look better than they actually are.

Well, Meta just low-key confirmed it.

The new “Incremental” column is here

There’s now an Incremental Attribution column in Ads Manager. No announcement. No popup. Just… there.

It shows you how many conversions Meta believes your ads actually caused (based on Meta’s modeled data), not just the ones it took credit for because someone saw or clicked your ad.

In one real account:

• Meta’s reported 7DC1DV ROAS: 2.18

• Actual incremental ROAS: 1.21

And yeah, most of that drop came from 1-day view conversions — usually warm audiences or existing customers the system already knew were going to convert.

🎥 Just dropped a video breaking it all down

If you want to see how this looks, how to read it, and how much fake performance I’m seeing across multiple accounts…

👉 Watch the YouTube video here

This is going to expose lazy buyers and fake performance reports everywhere.

(And if you have anything else you want to see me make videos about, smash the reply button right now and let me know!)

Why this matters

If you’re:

• Scaling ads

• Approving budgets

• Reporting performance to a client or boss

Then optimizing for 7-day click / 1-day view without exclusions is probably inflating your performance.

Incremental Attribution lets you actually check yourself.

How you can adjust

✅ Use 1-day or 7-day click attribution setting

✅ Add multipliers on top of your conversions for real-world performance

✅ Monitor audience segment breakdowns to see who’s actually converting and how

✅ Re-evaluate creative that performs too well in warm audiences and not for colder audiences

This is exactly what we cover in Building Ads with Barry

How to interpret attribution windows

How the system can cheat and how to prevent it

How to identify real scalable winners

How to build creative for cold + warm traffic

How to scale without BS performance metrics

🧠 Next cohort starts May 19

I don’t know what you’re waiting for 👉 buildingadswithbarry.com

If you’re serious about Meta Ads, you’re already falling behind if you’re not using this.

All it takes is one nugget from the course and it can pay for the entire cost:

The Deep End

If you’ve made it all the way down here, reply “deep end” and I’ll pick one person to get a $500 discount off the course or if you've already signed up for the course a free 30-minute consulting call.

Alrighty, that’s it! Catch you in the next one. If there’s anything else you’d like me to cover in this newsletter, let me know!

Hott regards,

Barry Hott