Facebook may have phased out Atlas for ad serving, but Atlas’ measurement capabilities have been transitioning into Business Manager. Most recently, Facebook introduced a new measurement tool for attribution to help advertisers better understand the customer journey.
The free tool utilizes the Facebook pixel to report on performance from Facebook’s family of apps, as well as off-Facebook media such as AdWords. In order to get data from other platforms, impression and click tags provided by Facebook need to be applied to the outside campaigns. At this time, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter have chosen not to support this level of tracking; below is the list of platforms that are supported.
Even though there are some limitations for integration, Facebook has finally created a way to combine other platforms and put aside its bias. The report doesn’t inform automated bidding, but it leverages Facebook’s people-based data, which gives a more comprehensive view of cross-device conversions. Users can also choose from various models including last-touch, positional and time-decay. Facebook has provided a data-driven model as well, but it can only be used with Facebook data for now.
Facebook has made attribution modeling more accessible for companies of all sizes. For advertisers already using an attribution model, it’s still valuable to check to see how Facebook’s data compares to any existing attribution model. As the tool continues to develop, Facebook will get closer to providing an all-in-one measurement platform.