Facebook announced a number of changes that will affect the measurement of advertising effectiveness in social networks and user behavior. The main innovations:
- Updating the metrics;
- Startup Metrics FYI blog where on a regular basis will be news about the Facebook metrics;
- The possibility to check the efficiency of advertising in Facebook using third-party companies. The visibility test is now available for all ad formats, not only video;
- The creation of a Council on measurement (Measurement Council). Its purpose is to develop measurement standards. The Council will consist of representatives of major advertising agencies, companies and technology partners;
- Update the reporting interface. This change will allow advertisers to include in the report only those metrics that meet the goals of the campaigns.
Organic reach will be measured in the visible impressions. Organic and paid impressions will now only be included if the post or ad is the visible part of the user's screen. The change will be implemented in the coming months. After launch it is expected to decrease the organic reach on average 20%.
The completion rate hits
Facebook will change the approach to the assessment of the duration of the video. The change will lead to higher values of this index in average by 35%.
The time spent on "instant article"
According to Facebook, since August, the time spent on "instant articles", was overestimated on average by 7-8%. Metric displays the average amount of time. Now she will be calculated by dividing the total time spent on article, number of views.
Analytics for apps
The metric Referrals in Analytics for Apps was to reflect the number of transitions in the app or on the website. Instead, it showed the total number of clicks on the content in the posts, including clicks on the photo or video.
Disable the lists of interests
A list of interests that allow users to group content for later viewing, will be disabled because of rare use.
More understandable names for advertising metrics
Advertising metrics on Facebook will undergo a complete review and processing. The update is designed to make their titles are intuitive to users. For example, the "video Views" will now be renamed "3 second video views". Also will be clarified definitions of the metrics and their calculation methodology.
Vice President, advertising development, Facebook Mark Rabkin:
"We want to make our work more transparent for advertisers. We know that rapid development has led to the emergence of new types of user behavior and new ad formats. Our customers want to get more information about the behavior and the metrics are also developing rapidly. As soon as there is a problem taking into account video views, we doubled our efforts to identify problems and establishing communication with clients".
