Meta’s Two New Optimisation Updates: Game-Changer or Just More Noise?

Hey Founder,

Meta just rolled out two updates that are getting a lot of buzz in the media buying world — Value Optimization and Incremental Attribution.

On paper, they sound impressive. More data. More control. More “smart” automation.

But what do they actually mean for your performance?

Let me break them down — and share what early testing is really telling us.

🔑 1. Value Optimization: Tell Meta What Really Matters

With this new feature, Meta allows you to set which types of conversion values matter most to your brand. Think:

• High customer lifetime value

• Subscription vs. one-off purchases

• Low-return risk or high-margin customers

This is a shift away from “cheapest conversion wins” to “most valuable customer wins.”

Why this matters:
Historically, Meta has been great at finding cheap conversions. But cheap doesn’t always mean valuable — especially if those customers return the product, churn quickly, or never come back.

Early testing:
We’ve started trialing this setting with a few clients and have seen a modest uplift in ROAS and new customer value. Not game-changing just yet, but promising — especially for brands focused on long-term LTV over short-term spikes.

Keep an eye on this one if:

• You have strong post-purchase data

• Your AOV varies wildly by product

• You’re optimising for quality not volume
  
  More on this here: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/optimize-conversions-for-business-values

📈 2. Incremental Attribution: Meta’s Attempt at Proving Real Impact

This is the bigger headline. Meta is introducing Incremental Attribution — a new way to measure performance based on conversions that likely wouldn’t have happened without the ad.

In other words: Meta’s trying to tell you which ads actually drove new revenue vs. which ones just tagged along.

Sounds amazing, right?

But here’s the catch.

Early insights from colleagues show:

• This model requires a ton of conversion volume to work reliably

• In some cases, no improvement was seen in actual business revenue

• Optimization got slower, and some campaigns actually underperformed

Why? Because Meta needs a statistically significant baseline to determine what’s truly “incremental” — and most brands just don’t have the data volume to make this meaningful.

So for now, we’re approaching this one with caution.

It may become powerful for enterprise-level advertisers with huge datasets, but for most brands under $5M or even $10M in annual revenue? You’re better off running a holdout test or scaling based on real business impact.

🎯 What To Do Next

• Test Value Optimization if you’re focused on LTV and have a clear idea of what makes a customer “high value”

• Hold off on Incremental Attribution unless you’re spending heavily and want to run side-by-side experiments

• As always — measure based on revenue, contribution margin, and new customer acquisition. Not platform promises.

Meta is moving in the right direction. But you still need to own the strategy.

Want to get feedback on your strategy?

I offer a free 15-minute consult on your ecomm store marketing.

Here is a link to my calendly where you can book a call at a time that works: https://calendly.com/jessiehealy/coffee_with_jessie

x

Jessie