Meta Best Practices for More Accurate Reporting and Better Performance

Original post: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/best-practices-for-more-accurate-reporting-and-better-performance

By Goksu Nebol-Perlman, Director of Product Marketing, Ads, Meta

Last September, we began a conversation with you about the products we were building in order to help improve your performance and measurement on our platforms. Since then, we’ve completed the roll out of those product improvements. Today, we’re sharing that we now estimate—in aggregate—that we’ve closed the underreporting of iOS web conversions from 15% in September down to approximately 8%.¹ While the factors that lead to underreporting may vary between advertisers and even campaigns, one of the main reasons for this improvement was that many advertisers have adopted the best practices we recommended.

As we continue to build ad solutions that can do more with less data, we expect some level of underreporting will remain as part of our baseline. However, we remain committed to helping your business succeed and grow as we adapt to ecosystem changes together. So, in addition to the best practices we provided in September and October, below is a list of actions advertisers can take right now to help optimize and measure your ad campaigns.

Reporting Best Practices for Web Conversion Campaigns

For those running web conversion campaigns to drive sales off of Meta’s platforms, we recommend you:

• Integrate with the Conversions API: Advertisers sending their events through the Conversions API can better measure ad performance and attribution across their customer’s full journey, from discovery to conversion, while offering the same privacy protections we’ve put in place across our other Business Tools. To set up the Conversions API, the quickest and easiest ways are to use a commerce platform or the Conversions API Gateway—neither of which require developer resources.
• Verify all domains: Help us know that the domains where the conversions most important to you take place (such as a purchase) are connected with your business. Verification is especially important if you value conversions across multiple domains (e.g., if your website uses redirectors or geo-redirects). This should ensure the proper account has the authority to prioritize events and enables event measurement for opted-out iOS users from associated web pages—for example, when a user clicks on an ad and lands on jaspersmarket.com, but later purchases through jaspersmarket.co.uk based on the user’s geographic location.
• Ensure your conversion events are aligned with your business and campaign priorities: Be sure to check the order of your 8 events in Events Manager to ensure your most valuable goals are ranked first. For example, if purchases are your top priority, make sure purchases are in the number one spot.
• Allow time before you analyze campaign performance: Given the nuances of delayed data and modeled reporting, give conversion-optimized campaigns at least 72 hours (or wait for the full length of the optimization window selected) before evaluating performance.

Reporting Best Practices for App Conversion Campaigns

For those businesses running app conversion campaigns to drive in-app actions such as installs, we recommend you:

• Use a 24-hour conversion window: To help our system best optimize for the fastest and most predictable feedback cycles, use a 24-hour conversion window. You can use a longer conversion window, but this may impact optimization opportunities.
• Optimize for your business objective: This helps our system optimize for what most closely aligns with your business goals. For example, if your main goals are app installs and cost per install, then you may want to optimize for Mobile App Installs.

And as we stated in September, we continue to adapt quickly and provide transparent communication when we discover bugs that impact measurement. For example, last week we resolved and promptly communicated to relevant advertisers a bug that temporarily led to underreporting of offsite conversion metrics for some web and app campaigns. The changes we made to resolve the issue improved the measurement for affected metrics.

While measurement issues have made decision-making more challenging, the outcomes we drive for you are ultimately what matter most, and we know that adopting these best practices can help there as well. We also have additional strategies outlined below that can help increase performance.

Strategies to Increase Performance

We also offer tools that help drive performance using machine learning, like automatically finding the most relevant audiences. For example, our internal lift studies showed that Detailed Targeting Expansion, which uses an advertiser’s targeting preferences, such as interests, as a guideline to find additional audiences, had a 37% lower median cost per incremental conversion than when not used.²

Additionally, consider showing your ads across 6 or more Placements, like on Facebook Marketplace or in Instagram Stories, giving our system more flexibility to control costs and get you better results. This can also be achieved by using the Automatic Placements option when setting up campaigns.

Finally, for our advertisers running app install campaigns, we offer Automated App Ads. Our internal tests showed that Automated App Ads saw a median 6% lower cost per install and a median 9% lower cost per action than a manual app install campaign setup.³

As we progress through 2022, we will continue to update you on how to increase your performance on our platforms and ensure you’re able to build and grow your business.

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