Andy Roberts
Background:
In the face of recent
criticism over inaccurate data reporting, Facebook has announced a series of
initiatives designed to provide deeper understanding of the performance of its
products and increased levels of third party measurement.
Details and Implications:
For its first
initiative Facebook has expanded its partnership
with Nielsen to enable its Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) product to measure reach
and in-target performance on desktop and mobile across 8 new markets, bringing
the total to 25 global markets. New markets are: New Zealand, Hong Kong, South
Africa, Puerto Rico, Turkey, Taiwan, Poland and Ireland. It has also extended
its partnership with comScore going beyond viewability to include in-target
performance for Facebook properties in the United States. This will start with
tests using comScore to evaluate in-target reach for audiences on desktop and
mobile through its validated Campaign Essentials (vCE) product.
The initiative is welcomed as it provides demographic support of
traditional Facebook data targeting across more markets and products. This
enhancement also brings Facebook closer to what we regard as a standard
facility across most other digital vendors. We continue to push all publishers
and platforms, including Facebook, to introduce third party audience
verification across all markets as soon as possible.
The second initiative sees the extension of third party viewability
measurement beyond Facebook and Instagram video to more placements, apps and
services including Audience Network in-stream video via comScore and Integral
Ad Science (IAS). The issues surrounding display viewability are now being
addressed on Facebook through comScore, Integral Ad Science and Moat. These
partners will be able to provide metrics on when a display ad enters the
Facebook screen and when the entire ad appears on the screen. Facebook is also
adding a new viewability verification partner, DoubleVerify.
For some time GroupM have been pressurising Facebook to firstly allow
and then to extend the use of third party verification to bring it in line with
the majority of the market. So it is good to see progress although the speed of
integration and the interpretation of output data has been slow. We
welcome the inclusion of more verification partners to provide more robust
comparisons. However, we are keen to see measurement extended across more
markets and to see faster acceptance of output data to allow us to make better
informed investment decisions.
The final initiatives involve two ways of improving the sharing of
insights. The first of these involves the expansion of the Metrics FYI blog to
cover all aspects of measurement. It will be renamed Measurement FYI. The
second sees the introduction of a portal where measurement partners can gather
data directly from Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network to provide better
quality inputs for market mix modelling (MMM). The MMM portal is designed to
provide more accurate and actionable insights for advertisers that engage in
cross-channel measurement and planning.
Finally advertisers and agencies are being
allowed through the garden walls to have exportable access to Facebook data
that was previously restricted solely to its domain. Whilst we are
still to learn the full extent of data access and whether this is available to
all clients, it is certainly a positive step in the right direction and will
allow access and use of source data. However, given recent measurement issues,
we will continue to have worries about the true accuracy of FB sourced data
unless it is third-party verified.
