Conversion Lift: Helping Marketers Better Understand the Impact of Facebook Ads

[djbaxter]

Conversion Lift: Helping Marketers Better Understand the Impact of Facebook Ads
FaceBook Business News
January 27, 2015

Measurement is one of the biggest challenges facing advertisers today. Knowing how and where advertising dollars are performing is crucial information, but many current solutions don?t offer a complete picture of how different marketing channels perform. As a marketer advertising across many different devices, platforms and channels, it?s hard to know which channels are actually driving additional business.

To help advertisers determine exactly how Facebook ads impact their bottom line, we?re expanding our conversion lift measurement capabilities. Building on existing Facebook measurement offerings, conversion lift allows advertisers to accurately determine the additional business driven by Facebook ads and make future marketing decisions based on this information.

What is conversion lift?
Conversion lift accurately captures the impact that Facebook ads have in driving business for marketers. Here?s how it works:

• When creating a Facebook campaign, a randomized test group (people that see ads) and control group (people that don?t) are established
• The advertiser securely shares conversion data from the campaign with Facebook. Typically, this data comes from sources like the Facebook Custom Audiences pixel, conversion pixel or secure point-of-sale (POS) data.
• Facebook determines additional lift generated from the campaign by comparing conversions in the test and control groups
• The results of the study are made available in Ads Manager

Why measure conversion lift?
Conversion lift is a better solution not just for advertisers on Facebook, but for digital marketers in general. It addresses several of the measurement challenges currently facing marketers:

• Over-reliance on clicks: While last-click attribution makes sense for search marketing, it?s less useful for other digital or display environments. Counting clicks doesn?t account for the value created by simply seeing an ad. By allowing advertisers to measure the impact of exposure to an ad ? with consistency, across devices ? conversion lift measurement offers a more holistic view of an ad?s performance.
  
• The rapid shift to mobile: The technology that supports current measurement systems (cookies to track exposure and tie to behavior, and clicks as a proxy for sales) is not sufficient in a world where people use multiple devices throughout the day and the majority of purchases still happen in a physical store.
  
• Ineffective testing methods: To date, there hasn?t been a widely adopted standard to determine the direct impact of digital advertising. Conversion lift testing is based upon the principles of lift measurement, a scientific approach used in a number of industries ? such as direct mail marketing ? to determine causation.
  

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