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The Big Story: Facebook’s Attribution Sinkhole

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Attribution on Facebook ain’t what it used to be.

The Facebook that enabled hundreds of creative versions, targeting variations and near-instantaneous optimization – all fed by data – is changing.

Apple took a big bite out of Facebook’s attribution capabilities when its AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) required apps to collect a user opt-in to track their account for advertising.

On this week’s Big Story, we unpack how Facebook is responding to these changes.

The number of creative elements it can optimize in a campaign is going down. So is the granularity with which marketers can target audiences. Plus, it’s recommending that marketers optimize at a much slower pace, like waiting a full 72 hours for data to come in before adjusting a campaign.

Facebook is pushing geo-testing as an attribution model, since it doesn’t require user-level tracking. And it’s limiting the number of conversion events a marketer can have to eight, a move that’s surely causing a “Hunger Games” for large marketing teams with many campaigns running.

Also in this episode: We discuss the two key takeaways from LUMA’s digital market report and Advertiser Perceptions’ latest DSP report, including a slowdown on the M&A front and a rise in marketers using self-service over managed service DSPs.

 

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