Meta is making a change to how it reports click-based attribution.
Starting later this month, Meta advertisers will no longer only see “click-through attribution.”
Instead, Meta will segment the social media-type engagement that occurs on its platforms – including shares, like, saves, bookmarks, comments, etc. – into a category called “engage-through attribution.”
When, for example, someone clicks a link that sends them directly to an advertiser’s page or account, that will still be considered click-through attribution. It mirrors how click-throughs work in search, where the metric originated, according to Meta.
Meta will also still allow view-through attribution for advertisers that prefer to attribute based on impressions, according to a speaker from Meta’s product marketing teamer who briefed press on background prior to the announcement on Tuesday.
But the view-through and click-through reporting will be much diminished by Meta’s new social engage-through metric.
Why now?
From Meta’s point of view, this change is called for because social media has surpassed search as the world’s leading channel for ad spend.
In other words, Meta had been playing the game by Google’s rules, simply because those were the rules everyone followed. But social media has its own signals of intent and methods for funneling customers toward purchases. And Meta sees social media as a fundamentally different channel that merits its own metrics, the Meta speaker said.
Based on Meta’s new measurement definitions, ads that were shared by one person and later prompted friends or followers to search for or click through themselves will now be more clearly attributed as actions driven by social network behavior.
The updated definition of “click-through attribution” will also align more closely with Google Analytics, which only counts clicks that leads to the landing page.
Zooming out, these changes reflect a broader effort by the platforms to reassert their grip on data-driven ad attribution as incrementality measurement and new forms of media mix modeling (MMM) become the preeminent attribution philosophies.
Google and Meta have open-sourced and launched their own MMM solutions. But Google’s MMM, called Meridian, unsurprisingly excels at measuring and attributing activity within the Googleverse, while Meta’s Robyn is, no shock here, better at measuring social impact.
In response to a question from AdExchanger about how this change better reflects the value of social media, the Meta speaker said that, before this update, Meta advertisers struggled to “tease out” how their social media engagement showed up in Google Analytics reports.
Now, he said, the click-through rate will include only the final clicks on a link, and there will be view-through reporting for those that prefer to attribute based on ad impressions. “All the other social engagement will be more cleanly and clearly captured in the engage-through bucket.”
