Facebook Opens Gate to Attribution Firms, Grants Adometry Certification

Facebook is gradually opening up to third party ad vendors, including ad tracking companies. Its list of certified tracking partners includes Atlas, Mediamind and Pointroll. Until today, none of them was exclusively focused on the burgeoning niche of attribution management.

That changes with the certification of pure play Adometry’s tags for the Facebook platform. Customers of the Adometry Attribute product can now include Adometry tracking with their premium ad buys. It appears the tag placements, for now at least, must be negotiated deals with the Facebook ads team – no self-serve or Ads API buyers need apply. This may change as Facebook releases its premium ad inventory to the self/API channels, a very recent development.

There are other limits as well, which apply not just to Adometry but to all certified tracking firms operating on Facebook. The ads can only run in paid media, versus theearned and owned placements that would be equally interesting for a brand marketer to examine through an attribution modeling platform such as Adometry’s.

But for large brand marketers, adding premium ads to their attribution models is clearly an improvement over the previous tracking options, which restricted advertisers to observing click data or using Facebook’s enhanced metric capabilities within the Facebook platform.

Adometry CEO Paul Pellman tells AdExchanger, “What this allows us to do for clients is look at Facebook paid media like they will look at any other media channel that we’re tracking performance against, and bring all of that rich data and insights into our attribution and optimization platform. Without that, the only data they really provided, at least for us as an attribution platform, were clicks that were generated off their ads. Thereal value for advertisers now is to understand how Facebook is working like all other media are working – that is, to ultimately drive people to convert.”

Pellman continues, “Understanding how those impressions drive awareness, intent to purpose, and ultimately get someone to go to a website or perform some conversion that we can track, it’s going to help advertisers better understand how Facebook plays effectively in their overall media mix.”

Adometry is rated near the front of the pack of specialist attribution players by analysts and senior marketers – and is often mentioned in the same breath as chief competitor Visual IQ. In an April Wave Report, Forrester gave it points for sophisticated algorithmic modeling and its clean integration with demand side platforms.

And in a recent conversation with AdExchanger, Initiative’s EVP of performance analytics, Bret Leece, said, “Adometry has got the statisticians but they also have computer scientists. They’re working jointly together. That’s what’s coming up as the future.”

By Zach Rodgers

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