# Conversion Tracking & Attribution

Setting the pixel, the event and the attribution windows that decide what counts as a result on your Meta ads.

Canonical: https://adsap.ai/docs/guides/launch/conversion-settings
Updated: 2026-09-13

This is the part of an ad set that decides **what counts as a result**. Get it wrong and the ads still run, the money still goes out, and everything you read afterwards is unreliable.

It lives in the **Conversion & Performance** and **Attribution** sections of the [ad set form](/guides/launch/ad-sets).

## Conversion Location

Where the result happens. The options depend on the campaign objective, which you fixed when you created the campaign:

| Objective | Conversion locations |
|---|---|
| **Awareness** | None. Awareness has no conversion location |
| **Traffic** | Website, Instagram or Facebook |
| **Engagement** | On your ad (video views, post engagement), Website, Instagram or Facebook (page likes, profile visits) |
| **Leads** | Instant Forms, Website, Website and Instant Forms |
| **Sales** | Website |
| **App Promotion** | App |

## Dataset (Pixel)

For website conversions, the pixel reporting them. Meta now calls this a dataset, so the field is **Dataset (Pixel)**.

The account default lives in [Launch Settings](/guides/account-defaults/launch-settings), so this field is often filled in already.

Before trusting a new pixel, confirm it receives the event you plan to optimize for. An installed pixel that never fires your purchase event looks identical here to one that works.

## Custom Event Type

Which event to optimize for: Purchase, Lead, Add to Cart, and so on. For app campaigns this becomes an **App Event**, with the **App** and its **App Store URL**.

**Optimize for the event you want, not the one that fires most.** Optimizing for Add to Cart because it has more volume gets you people who add to cart. Meta finds exactly what you asked for.

The exception is volume. An event that happens a handful of times a week gives Meta too little to learn from. If purchases are rare, optimizing for a reliable earlier step can work better, as long as you keep judging the campaign on purchases.

## Performance Goal

What Meta maximizes. The list narrows with the objective and the conversion location together.

Awareness offers goals like maximizing reach, ad recall lift, impressions, ThruPlay views or 2-second continuous video views. Website traffic offers landing page views or link clicks. Website and Instant Forms optimizes for pixel conversions, and its ads carry both a website URL and an instant form. Messaging, calls, event responses, reminders and shop destinations are not available in Adsap yet; see [what Adsap cannot launch yet](/guides/launch/ad-sets#what-adsap-cannot-launch-yet).

Landing page views against link clicks is the choice to think about on a traffic campaign. Link clicks counts people who clicked. Landing page views counts people whose browser arrived. The gap between them is your page load speed, and optimizing for the second one stops you buying clicks that bounce before the page renders.

## Attribution

**Attribution Model** is either **Standard (Last Touch)** or **Incremental (Data-Driven)**.

The windows are in days:

- **Click-through**: how long after clicking a conversion still counts.
- **View-through**: how long after merely seeing the ad it counts.
- **Engage-through**: 1 day after a non-link click on the ad or a qualifying video play.

### What to know

Attribution changes what Meta **counts**, not what **happened**. A longer window does not make the ads work better; it credits them with more.

View-through in particular credits conversions to people who never clicked. That is legitimate, and also the easiest way to make an underperforming campaign look fine.

Whatever you choose, **keep it stable**. Changing the window mid-flight makes every before-and-after comparison meaningless, and nothing in the numbers afterwards shows the change unless you remember making it.

## When tracking breaks

Tracking tends to break after a change to your website, not to your ads, and it breaks silently: the campaigns keep spending and stop recording results.

Adsap watches for this. The **No conversions have been recorded** [alert](/guides/recommendations/alerts) fires when an account that normally records conversions has recorded none for a run of days while still spending. Switch on the [daily alert email](/guides/email-notifications) for that reason alone.