Every week the platforms make changes they don't announce loudly. The data quietly shifts. Media buyers start scratching their heads at numbers that don't match reality. And brands either catch it — or they don't.

This is that weekly catch.

🔴 The Big One: Meta's March Attribution Rebuild Is Still Confusing People

If your year-over-year ROAS comparisons looked off in March and April, you're not imagining it.

Meta redefined what counts as a "click" in March 2026. Previously, a like, share, save, or comment could be attributed as a click-through conversion if a purchase followed within seven days. Under the new rules, only actual link clicks count. Somebody tapping a heart emoji on your ad is no longer getting credited as a conversion — even if they bought three days later.

What this means in practice: Reported conversions dropped for many accounts. Not because ads stopped working. Because Meta cleaned up its own attribution bucket — and a lot of what was being claimed never should have been.

This is the platform grading its own homework and finally marking some of the wrong answers red. The underlying business didn't change. The reported number did.

If your media buyer panicked and cut budget in March or April based on the dashboard drop, that's worth auditing.

🔴 Advantage+ Is Quietly Inflating Your ROAS — Here's the Mechanism

Meta added engaged-view attribution to Advantage+ Shopping campaigns in early 2026. The video threshold dropped from 10 seconds to 5 seconds. That means if someone watches 5 seconds of your video and then buys your product within a day — via any path — Meta is now claiming that as an attributed conversion.

The result: reported ROAS on most accounts has been inflated by roughly 15–25% since this change rolled out. Most advertisers don't know it happened.

There's a second mechanism compounding this. Without a cap on existing customer spend, the Advantage+ algorithm tends to over-index on retargeting existing customers because they convert more easily — inflating ROAS numbers while limiting new customer acquisition.

So you may be looking at a 4x ROAS number that is actually built on two distortions:

1. Engaged-view conversions that shouldn't be there
2. Retargeting spend being claimed as prospecting wins

The number looks great. The business growth might be flat. These are different things.

🟡 The Signal Loss Problem Isn't Getting Better

This one is slow-moving but compounding.

iOS tracking restrictions have created 40–70% attribution gaps since 2021. For a business spending $50K/month on Meta ads, this translates to $7,500–10,000 monthly in lost optimization opportunities and misallocated budget.

CAPI helps. But CAPI alone doesn't close the loop on where that spend actually went — it just returns more conversion events to Meta's black box. The platform still decides how to model the gaps.

If you haven't audited your Meta Conversions API setup since 2024, do it now. The underlying signal quality issue has been growing for years — the attribution rebuild just made it more visible.

The brands winning right now are the ones who have a number independent of Meta to validate against. When your internal attribution disagrees with the dashboard, you need to know which one to trust. Right now, most brands have no way to answer that question.

🟡 What This Looks Like at Ground Level

I've been talking to eCommerce operators running between $50K–$500K/month in paid spend. The pattern is consistent:

• Meta dashboard shows strong CPA and stable ROAS
• Actual new customer acquisition is flat or declining
• Repeat customers are being claimed as "new" conversions
• Ad spend is growing into the wrong cohort

The platform is not lying on purpose. It's optimizing for the signal you give it — and if the signal includes existing customers, that's what it will chase. It will be very efficient about it. It will report excellent numbers. Your new customer count won't move.

This is the distinction that matters in 2026: CPA vs. new customer CPA. They are not the same number. Most dashboards only show you one of them.

What to Do This Week

1. Pull your Advantage+ ROAS in two views: 7-day click only vs. the full attribution window including engaged-view. The gap between those two numbers is your inflation figure. Know it.
2. Check your existing customer budget cap in ASC. If it's not set or is set above 30%, you're optimizing for retention under the label of acquisition.
3. Compare your Meta-reported new customer count against your CRM or Shopify new customer report for the last 90 days. If they diverge by more than 20%, you have a real attribution problem — not a performance problem.
4. Run a holdout test. Turn off one geography or segment for two weeks. Measure the actual revenue difference. That number — not the ROAS — tells you if the ads are working.

The platforms will keep changing the buckets. The numbers will keep moving. The only anchor is first-party data that sits outside the platform's reporting layer — data the algorithm can't touch, model over, or claim credit for.