2021 has been a year of struggle for Facebook Media Buyers, Agencies, and Companies who rely on the platform for their business.
With this new landscape of delayed attribution and aggregated event measurement, how are you supposed to find what works and improve it?
Meta for business has recently released a short guide for analyzing ad results (which can be found here), but I wanted to quickly cover their suggestions and expand on what it means for you and me.
So let’s get into it…
Suggestion 1: Wait 3 days before making performance decisions.
Meta recommends waiting 72 hours or the full length of the optimization window (say 7 days) before seeing if your campaign is working or not.
This is because data is being delayed and reporting is being modeled for us…
Waiting will give us a more accurate picture of performance because we’ll have more actual data to use (makes sense right?).
Suggestion 2: Analyze results at the campaign level instead of the creative level.
Meta says that “estimated conversions” rely on data that are collected at the campaign level and reported with a delay…
So basically we’ll get the most accurate reading of performance when we look at the campaign level results vs. the ad set or ad level results.
Suggestion 3: Make sure your conversion events are prioritized.
In order to take full advantage of aggregated event measurement, we need to make sure we’re setting the right priorities for Facebook.
If a purchase is the most important to your business then make sure that it is selected as the highest priority event.
Why this is important is because Facebook only sends back and uses “one attributed conversion event per user”.
So if a customer becomes a lead, adds a product to their cart, and purchases within a 7-day conversion window, and the Purchase event is your highest priority event then only a purchase event will be sent back and used – not the lead or add to cart event.
If lead was your highest priority only what would be used in reporting in this example.
Conclusions…
- Accurate daily ad performance management and optimization is almost impossible, you have to wait for delayed attributions to show up.
- When you do look at performance to make decisions use the campaign level results, they will be the most reliable.
- Make sure you’ve got your priorities straight because it matters in the data that you’re able to see and use in making decisions.