06:09
Why attribution massively underreports Meta ads impact
Good evening. I’m back on camera.
I was very recently with Chris Sadler of Kimble Solar, and he said something that really stuck with me about attribution.
Roughly £180,000 in revenue could be directly attributed to our ads.
That’s revenue we can clearly track through the funnel we built.
But there was another figure.
An additional £221,000 in revenue cited social media as a reason for either enquiring or choosing Kimble Solar — even though it didn’t come through the funnel.
Which means we were only reporting on around 45% of the revenue that was actually influenced by the campaigns.
That’s not a rounding error.
That’s a structural blind spot.
This video is about why attribution always underreports impact, why education-led video ads behave very differently to price-led ads, and why social media works as a long-term nurturing channel — even when the final conversion happens somewhere else.
For context, this video was originally recorded on 5 December 2024, views & strategies may have changed since.
Featuring
Video transcript
Good evening. Guess who is back on camera. I was very recently with Chris Sadler of Kimble, who many of you will recognise, and he said something particularly interesting that I want to share with you about attribution and the success of his Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns with us.
He explained that around £180,000 of revenue has been generated directly through our advertising efforts—possibly a bit more by now, as that figure was from about a week ago. That revenue can be directly attributed to our ads because it came through the funnel we built, which is how we track and claim credit for performance.
However, he also said that an additional £221,000 in revenue cited social media as a reason for either inquiring or going ahead with Kimble Solar, even though it didn’t come through the funnel we created. What that means is we were only reporting on around 45% of the total revenue that was influenced in some way by our advertising campaigns.
Think about how crazy that is. All of our highlight case studies, all the success stories, and all the happy customer results are potentially showing figures as low as 45% of what these campaigns are actually generating in reality.
Why does that happen? First of all, whenever you advertise on social media, you’re simply putting more eyeballs on your business. Even if your ads were terrible, people would still click through to your profile, maybe visit your website, and if your website is strong enough, they might convert. So there’s always going to be additional impact beyond what you can directly track.
But I think the real reason the discrepancy is so large—and the benefit is so significant beyond what we’re taking credit for—is because Kimble Solar’s ads are heavily focused on education. They’re video ads, which will come as no surprise if you’ve heard me talk about this before, and they show really strong workmanship and high-quality installations.
What that does is act as a nurturing mechanism. Very few people are nurtured by ads that just say “£5,995, 14 panels, two batteries, £1,000 off this month.” That kind of messaging doesn’t nurture anyone. In fact, it usually just annoys people and commoditises your business.
What you want to be doing with social media advertising is not just generating leads and sales, but also nurturing prospects over time. This is a very clear-cut example of how that works in practice.
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