Meta’s newer adset conversion settings are designed to help advertisers manage customer acquisition, attribution quality, and purchase value more intentionally. The key is not to find one “best” setting, but to understand what each option does and use it in the right context.
Key Takeaways
Get conversions from all audiences is usually the safest default for most sales campaigns because it allows Meta to optimize across both new and returning customers.
Acquire new customers behaves similarly to excluding past customers and should be used when new customer acquisition is the main business objective.
Incremental attribution focuses on conversions Meta believes would not have happened without ad spend, making it useful for measuring true growth impact.
Value optimization can help increase average order value, but it should not dominate the entire account or it may reduce sales volume.
Campaigns using new customer acquisition or incremental attribution should be judged by new customer acquisition cost, not by the same ROAS expectations as broader campaigns.
A balanced account structure is more effective than overusing one setting across every campaign.
How It Works
1. Customer Life Cycle Strategy
The Customer Life Cycle Strategy setting lets advertisers decide whether Meta should optimize for conversions from everyone or prioritize acquiring new customers. The two major options are typically get conversions from all audiences and acquire new customers.
Get conversions from all audiences allows Meta to pursue purchases from both new and existing customers. This is often the best baseline option because returning customers, warm audiences, and high-intent users provide valuable data that can help Meta’s algorithm optimize delivery.
Acquire new customers is intended to push Meta toward finding people who have not purchased before. In practice, this is similar to excluding existing customers. Meta can identify these users through defined customer lists, website purchase events, CRM integrations, email platform audiences, or manually uploaded custom audiences.
2. Defining Existing Customers
To make new customer acquisition work properly, advertisers must define who counts as an existing customer. This can include a purchase audience from the last 180 days, customer email lists, Klaviyo segments, CRM exports, or other custom audiences. If this data is incomplete or messy, Meta may misclassify users and optimization quality may suffer.
When using customer exclusions or defined customer groups, be careful when editing these audiences. Large changes to customer definitions can affect multiple campaigns and may require the algorithm to re-adjust. Consistency in audience definitions helps maintain cleaner campaign learning.
3. Attribution Model: Standard vs. Incremental
The standard attribution model reports conversions based on Meta’s normal attribution rules, such as clicks and views within selected attribution windows. This can include conversions influenced by multiple channels, such as email, organic search, or direct traffic.
Incremental attribution attempts to optimize for conversions that likely would not have happened without Meta ads. In other words, it tries to separate sales caused by advertising from sales that may have occurred anyway due to existing demand, retention activity, email marketing, or returning customer behavior.
This setting can be especially relevant for brands with subscription models, high repeat purchase rates, or strong retention channels. However, it may show lower ROAS because it is intentionally filtering for harder-to-get, more incremental conversions.
Evaluate acquisition-focused campaigns by the cost of gaining new customers, not by the same ROAS standard used for broad retargeting-heavy campaigns.
4. Value Optimization
Value optimization tells Meta to prioritize conversion value rather than simply maximizing the number of purchases. Instead of looking only for the most likely buyers, Meta tries to find buyers who may generate higher order values.
This can be useful for stores with meaningful differences in product price, bundles, upsells, or premium product lines. However, it is not a universal solution. If every campaign is forced into value optimization, the account may lose purchase volume, limit learning, and reduce the effectiveness of the strategy.
A healthier structure is to use value optimization selectively, for example on campaigns focused on higher-ticket products, catalogs, bundles, or specific collections. For many accounts, keeping value optimization to a limited portion of the total budget is more sustainable than applying it everywhere.
Practical Tips
Use get conversions from all audiences as the default setting for most purchase campaigns unless there is a clear reason to prioritize new customers only.
Use acquire new customers when your main goal is growth, prospecting, or reducing dependence on repeat buyers and retargeting.
Build reliable existing customer audiences using purchase events, CRM data, email lists, subscription data, and customer platform integrations.
Test incremental attribution in a limited number of campaigns rather than switching the whole account at once.
Compare incremental or new-customer campaigns based on new customer acquisition cost, contribution to growth, and customer quality.
Use value optimization when average order value matters, but keep it controlled. A practical benchmark is to avoid allocating more than roughly 20–30% of budget to this approach unless testing proves otherwise.
For large stores with many SKUs, group products by collection, price range, margin, or buying intent instead of relying on one account-wide value optimization strategy.
Maintain a balanced campaign mix: broad conversion campaigns, selective acquisition-focused campaigns, and selective value-based campaigns.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Using one setting across the entire account. Meta’s settings are tools for different objectives. Overusing any one of them can weaken performance and reduce learning diversity.
Judging incremental campaigns by normal ROAS. Incremental campaigns may report lower ROAS because they are designed to avoid claiming conversions that would likely happen anyway.
Combining too many restrictive settings at once. Using acquire new customers and incremental attribution together may be excessive for many accounts. Test one major strategic constraint at a time.
Assuming value optimization is always better. Higher average order value is useful, but not if it comes at the cost of too much sales volume or unstable delivery.
Failing to define customer audiences properly. New customer acquisition settings depend heavily on accurate existing customer data. Poor audience hygiene can lead to poor optimization.
Ignoring channel overlap. Email, subscriptions, organic traffic, and repeat buyers can all influence purchase reporting. Choose settings based on whether you want total attributed revenue or more incremental growth measurement.
Making large account-wide changes too quickly. New settings should be tested gradually so performance can be measured clearly and risk is controlled.
The most effective approach is to match each Meta conversion setting to a specific business goal. Use broad conversion optimization for stability, new customer acquisition for growth, incremental attribution for cleaner impact measurement, and value optimization for selective high-value opportunities.
