Marketers may be missing up to $4.7m individually in Facebook ad revenue: report
Amid controversy over Facebook?s discrepancies in video metrics, a new report shows that marketers may be missing out on 192 percent more mobile ad revenue due to incorrect ad tracking data.
The new report took a look at behavior from several different marketers Facebook ad campaigns. They found that Facebook?s ad conversion tracking turned up with a large amount of missing revenue, up to 4.7 million dollars annually.
"Many of our clients have applied a mobile multiplier as a systematic approach to measuring Facebook performance, which we have found to be an effective process for determining the realized value of those ad dollars," said a spokesperson from Rakuten. "Accurately assessing marketing ROI will require some diligence from marketers until the industry adopts measurement solutions that are sophisticated enough to match the complexity of their strategies.
"This report is a strong example of the existing revenue opportunities that marketers can be capitalizing on today, by taking a closer look at what is happening beyond of their third-party analytics platforms and uniform attribution models."
Facebook ad tracking
In its recent report on Facebook ad tracking, titled The Facebook Measurement Divide, Rakuten looked at a number of marketers ad spending on Facebook, combined with Faceboook?s internal ad conversion tracking and a third-party tracking software.
What they found was that Facebook?s ad conversion tracking routinely underreported how much revenue was being gained from Facebook ad conversions.
The report found that conversion rates on desktop were mostly correct, with only a trivial difference of three percent.
Mobile on the other hand had quite a large discrepancy, in some cases two or three times as much revenue was being lost due to underreporting. One of the observed marketers registered a return of $1.9 million from Faceboook when in reality the return was closer $4.5 million.
The reasons for this are manifold. For one, mobile is much harder to attribute as it is so fragmented.
On a desktop, it is much easier to track someone across sites and platforms and keep all of those interactions under the umbrella of one customer identification.
Mobile on the other hand makes tracking much more difficult. It is mostly unconnected from methods of tracking consumers across devices, such as cookies, which are used to identify consumers as they travel from site to site.
Consumers that begin an interaction on desktop and finish it on mobile are much more complicated cases to crack. In that case, would the attribution go to the desktop ad or the mobile ad?
Discrepancies matter
These questions are what is driving the discrepancy. And that discrepancy matters, because what marketers see as their returns on investment will influence how they spend their money in the future.
If a brand or marketer thinks that Faceboook ads are not as successful as they are, it could lead them to step spending on ads that are effective, mistakenly believing that they are not driving customers.
If brands want to have a more accurate picture of how their ad money is being spent, as well as make smarter decisions with their targeting and social marketing budgets, it will be important for Facebook to get a better handle on its tracking software.
Facebook stands to gain from improving its tracking as well, by not scaring off marketers who perceive their ad money to be going to waste.