Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out!
That's a really good question, and honestly, it's something that trips up a lot of advertisers. You're right to be hesitant. The whole 1-day view vs 7-day click attribution thing on Meta can be a real headache, especially when you're trying to figure out what's actually making you money and what's just noise. It's easy to get lost in the platform's numbers and end up making the wrong call.
I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and a bit of a framework for how I'd approach this. The short answer is that you're right to be sceptical of those 1-day view conversions, particularly in a warm retargeting audience. The platform has its own agenda for showing you those numbers, and it's not always aligned with your actual profitability. Let's get into why that is and what you should be looking at instead.
TLDR;
- For warm retargeting audiences, 7-day click is a much stronger and more reliable indicator of an ad's impact than 1-day view. Be very sceptical of view-through conversions here.
- Meta's algorithm often over-attributes conversions to 'views' because it makes the platform's performance look better and encourages you to spend more on awareness-style creative.
- Stop relying solely on in-platform ROAS. The most important piece of advice is to calculate your Blended ROAS (or MER) by dividing your total store revenue by your total ad spend. This is your true north metric.
- Instead of just turning the ad off, run a proper incrementality test. Pause the ad for a week and see if your overall Blended ROAS and total revenue actually drop. If they don't, the ad wasn't contributing much.
- This letter includes a helpful flowchart visualising the customer journey, plus two interactive calculators to help you figure out your Blended ROAS and your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), which will help you decide what you can truly afford to pay for a customer.
We'll need to look at what Meta's numbers are really telling you...
First off, let's just quickly break down what these two metrics actually mean, just so we're on the same page. It's simple, but the implications are massive.
A 7-day click conversion is straightforward. Someone clicked your ad, and then within the next seven days, they made a purchase. This is a strong signal. The click shows active intent. They saw something they liked, they engaged with it, and it was a direct part of their journey to buying. You can be pretty confident that the ad played a significant role.
A 1-day view conversion is much murkier. Someone was served your ad, they scrolled past it (they didn't have to stop, just had to be on their screen), and then within 24 hours, they converted. They never clicked that specific ad. Now, did the ad *cause* the conversion? Or was it just a coincidence? This is the million-dollar question.
Tbh, Meta has a vested interest in making view-through conversions look important. Why? Because it justifies running ads that get lots of impressions but maybe not so many clicks. It makes their platform seem more influential than it might actually be. When you run a "Reach" or "Brand Awareness" campaign, the algorithm's job is to find the cheapest people to show your ad to. These people are cheap for a reason – they're not the ones who typically click or buy stuff. By counting view-through conversions, Meta can say, "Look, even showing your ad to these people works!" It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy that encourages you to keep spending.
Think of it like this: a click is someone raising their hand and saying "I'm interested". A view is just someone being in the same room when you shouted something. They might have heard you, they might not have. Crediting the conversion entirely to them being in the room is a big leap of faith.
I'd say you're dealing with the classic "retargeting trap"...
Now, this all gets even more complicated when you're talking about a warm retargeting audience, which is your exact situation. These people are not strangers. They've already been to your website. They might have added something to their cart. They might be on your email list. They've seen your brand before. They are already "in the funnel".
So, when you show an ad to someone in this audience and they convert on a 1-day view, the chances of that ad being the *deciding factor* are much, much lower. It's far more likely that they were already planning to come back and buy anyway. Maybe they got a payment reminder email. Maybe they just remembered on their own. Maybe they saw a different ad of yours yesterday. Your retargeting ad just happened to be the last thing Meta showed them before they finally went to your site and checked out.
The ad didn't necessarily *cause* the sale; it was just *present* when the sale happened. This is a critical distinction. In a warm audience, you're not trying to create demand, you're trying to capture existing intent. And a click is the best measure of that captured intent. A view is just... well, a view.
Let's look at a typical journey for someone in your warm audience. It probably looks something a bit more complex than just 'saw ad, bought product'.
Day 1: Initial Visit
User clicks a Google Search ad and browses your products.
Day 3: Social Proof
User sees an organic post from your brand on Instagram.
Day 5: Email Nudge
User gets an abandoned cart email with a small discount code.
Day 5: Ad View
User scrolls past your retargeting ad on Facebook. Doesn't click.
Day 5: Conversion
User remembers the email, goes directly to your site, and buys.
As you can see, that final ad 'view' was just one small part of a much longer process. Giving it all the credit is madness. It's like a football striker claiming a goal when the ball just happened to bounce off his back while he was facing the other way. The rest of the team did all the work!
So when you see an ad with good 1-day view ROAS and bad 7-day click ROAS in a warm audience, my alarm bells start ringing. It strongly suggests the ad isn't compelling enough to make people *act*, but it's getting credit for actions people were probably going to take anyway. This is a classic sign of an underperforming ad that's being propped up by flattering but ultimately misleading attribution.
For instance, I remember one campaign we worked on for a women's apparel brand. They had a retargeting ad that looked great on paper because of its 1-day view ROAS, but the 7-day click ROAS was terrible. We were skeptical, so we paused that specific ad to test its real impact. The result? Their total store revenue didn't drop at all. It confirmed our suspicion that the ad was just taking credit for sales that were already happening. We reallocated that budget to creative that actually drove clicks, and their overall profitability improved.
You probably should stop obsessing over ad-level ROAS...
This leads me to the most important point I'm going to make. You need to zoom out. Stop making decisions based purely on the ROAS of a single ad inside the Facebook Ads Manager. That dashboard is a useful tool, but it is not the source of truth for your business's profitability.
The real source of truth is what we call Blended ROAS, or sometimes Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER). It's dead simple to calculate:
Blended ROAS = Total Revenue / Total Ad Spend
That's it. All your revenue from all sources (your entire Shopify or whatever sales platform you use), divided by all your ad spend across all platforms (Facebook, Google, TikTok, etc.). This number tells you how efficiently your entire marketing engine is turning ad pounds into revenue pounds. It cuts through all the attribution nonsense because it doesn't care which channel gets the credit. It only cares about the overall result.
You should be tracking this number daily or at least weekly. This is your north star. If your Blended ROAS is healthy and climbing, you're doing well. If it's dropping, something is wrong, and you need to investigate.
So, how does this help with your specific problem? It gives you a way to test the *true* impact of that ad you're hesitant to turn off. This is called an incrementality test.
Here's what you do: Pause that specific ad (the one with good 1-day view but bad 7-day click ROAS). Leave everything else in your account running as is. Let it run for a week. At the end of the week, look at your numbers. Did your overall, total store revenue drop? Did your Blended ROAS get worse?
If your total revenue stays roughly the same and your Blended ROAS actually *improves* (because you spent less for the same result), then you have your answer. The ad was a dud. The 1-day view conversions were not incremental; they were just stealing credit for sales that were going to happen anyway. You can turn it off with confidence and re-allocate that budget to ads that actually drive clicks.
If, on the other hand, you see a noticeable dip in total revenue that's greater than the money you saved by pausing the ad, then maybe those view-throughs did have some influencing power after all. In that case, you could turn it back on. But honestly, in my experience with warm retargeting, this is the much rarer outcome.
You'll need a deeper understanding of your business economics...
Zooming out even further, the conversation about ROAS is only one part of the picture. A truly scalable advertising strategy isn't built on ROAS, it's built on a deep understanding of your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) and your allowable Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
The question shouldn't be "What's my ROAS?", it should be "How much can I afford to pay to acquire a new customer and still be profitable in the long run?".
To figure this out, you need three numbers:
- Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): How much a customer spends with you per month/year.
- Gross Margin %: Your profit margin on that revenue after costs of goods sold.
- Monthly Churn Rate %: The percentage of customers you lose each month.
The calculation is simple: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate
Once you know your LTV, you can decide on a healthy LTV:CAC ratio. A common target for growing businesses is 3:1, meaning you're willing to spend up to one-third of a customer's lifetime value to acquire them. This simple calculation completely changes how you view ad spend. A £50 CPA might seem terrible if the customer only buys a £60 product once. But if you know that, on average, a customer is actually worth £1,000 to your business over their lifetime, then paying £50 to get them looks like an incredible bargain.
It frees you from the tyranny of short-term ROAS and allows you to invest in growth intelligently. You're no longer worried about whether it was a 1-day view or a 7-day click; you're just focused on whether your overall CAC is below the target you've set based on your LTV.
This is the main advice I have for you:
Okay, that was a lot of theory. Let's boil it all down into a concrete plan of action for you. If I were in your shoes, this is exactly what I would do, in this order. I've put it into a table to make it as clear as possible.
| Action Item | Why This is Important | How to Implement It |
|---|---|---|
| Prioritise 7-Day Click | In a warm audience, clicks are a far more reliable signal of intent and ad effectiveness than views. This is your primary performance indicator for retargeting. | When evaluating ad performance in your warm campaigns, make your primary decision-making column the 7-day click ROAS or CPA. Treat 1-day view as a secondary, 'nice-to-have' metric at best. |
| Calculate Blended ROAS (MER) | This is your business's true north. It cuts through platform attribution issues and tells you if your marketing is actually working as a whole. | Create a simple spreadsheet. Every day or week, pull your total revenue from your store's backend and your total ad spend from all platforms. Divide revenue by spend. Track this over time. |
| Run an Incrementality Test | This is the only way to know for sure if the 1-day view conversions are real or just stolen credit. It removes all guesswork. | Pause the specific ad in question for 5-7 days. Do not change anything else. Monitor your Blended ROAS and total revenue. If they don't drop, the ad wasn't incremental. Turn it off for good. |
| Define Your Target CPA/CAC | Shifts your thinking from chasing ROAS to building a sustainable growth model based on long-term customer value. This is how you scale confidently. | Use the LTV calculator above. Figure out your LTV, then decide on a ratio (e.g., 3:1) to set your maximum allowable Customer Acquisition Cost. Now you have a clear pass/fail metric for your overall marketing. |
| Optimise Creative for Clicks | For retargeting, your goal isn't just to remind people you exist; it's to give them a compelling reason to come back *right now*. Passive ads get views, active ads get clicks. | Your warm audience ad creative should feature a strong Call to Action (CTA). Test different offers: a small discount, a 'back in stock' alert, a reminder of benefits, or strong social proof like a customer testimonial. Make them want to tap the button. |
Following these steps will move you from being reactive to the platform's often-misleading data to being proactive and in control of your own business's growth. It's a fundamental shift, but it's the one that seperates the advertisers who struggle from the ones who scale successfully.
I know this can feel like a lot to take on, especially when you're busy running the rest of your business. Digging into LTV, running proper tests, and constantly analysing data beyond the ad platforms takes time and expertise. It's not just about pushing buttons in Ads Manager; it's about building a robust measurement framework that gives you the confidence to invest your marketing budget wisely.
This is where getting some expert help can make a huge difference. We spend all day, every day inside ad accounts and analytics, building these frameworks for our clients. We can help you get clarity on your true performance and build a strategy that's focused on real, profitable growth, not just vanity metrics.
If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can take a look at your account together and give you some tailored advice. It might be a good next step to get you on the right track.
Hope this helps!
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
