If you’ve spent the last few years wondering why your Meta ad numbers look suspiciously rosier than what Google Analytics is telling you, you’re not imagining things.

Meta has just announced a series of updates to how it measures and reports ad performance, touching everything from what counts as a “click” to how long someone needs to watch a Reel before it registers as an engaged view.

Up until now, when Meta counted a “link click,” it wasn’t just counting people who clicked through to your website. It was also counting people who liked your ad, saved it, shared it; basically any interaction that involved a finger touching a screen. Meanwhile, Google Analytics and most third-party attribution tools were only counting actual link clicks, meaning the ones that end with someone landing on a page.

Meta’s fix means that link clicks now represent website-bound clicks, nothing more. This alignment with how Google Analytics and other platforms define the metric means cross-platform reporting will finally speak a common language.

On another note, the interactions that used to get bundled into “link clicks” (saves, shares, and other high-signal social behaviors) aren’t being erased. Instead they’re being moved to what Meta is now calling “engage-through attribution” (previously “engaged-view attribution”). The other notable change is that the minimum watch time for a video to count as an “engaged view” is dropping from 10 seconds to 5 seconds.

Meta’s ad ecosystem is vast, and its reporting has historically carried enough platform-specific quirks to keep media planners in a constant state of translation. These updates don’t solve everything, but they represent a meaningful step toward a more honest, comparable, and ultimately more useful set of metrics.

To learn more, click here.