A new measurement tool announced by Facebook on January 27th, 2014 will allow marketers to truly determine the reach and effectiveness of their Facebook Ads Campaign as a whole. Lift Measurement is basically a metric that determines additional reach and/or sales caused by an ad’s effect throughout a lifetime of that ad. It’s a different way of measuring, as opposed to having to rely on counting clicks and conversions, Lift Measurement further identifies the influence of an ad. Facebook wants to change the way that advertisers look at the effectiveness of their service by drawing a more direct line between its ads and when a consumer buys a product, even if the person doesn’t necessarily click on the link.
The problem is advertisers typically pay more when a customer clicks but it doesn’t account for the value created by simply seeing the ad, so the goal is to help advertisers track how ads influence behavior over time.
Brad Smallwood, Director of Marketing Science and Measurement and Facebook said, “It’s not a Facebook challenge, it’s and industry challenge”.
When creating a Facebook campaign, a randomized test group that see ads and a control group that don’t see ads are established. After the campaign ends, conversion data is sent to Facebook who then determines additional lift generated by comparing conversions in the test and control groups. The results of the study are made available in Ads Manager.
For now, it is only offered to a few select customers but this is the first step to offering the tool globally.
In the meantime, continue measuring your Facebook Ads Campaigns via existing Reporting Methods.