Facebook, FieldTest and the Importance of Trusting Data
Between their continuing battles against Apple regarding ad privacy and the decision to temporarily block users in Australia from reading and sharing news on their platform, Facebook has had some high profile headlines over the last two weeks. So you would be forgiven if you didn’t hear about their latest misstep when it comes to advertiser metrics and transparency. While Facebook and other social media platforms will continue to be a key part of most brands digital strategy for the foreseeable future, that doesn’t mean advertisers should give any platform a free pass when it comes to the things it’s asking you to trust them on. Especially when it deals with your ad budgets and your continuing quest to find new customers. That’s why we’re taking the opportunity with this week's blog post to talk about FieldTest, the data we use, and why you can rest assured that your ad dollars are being spent accurately and wisely.
This latest Facebook issue is easy enough to tackle: the social media giant was counting both fake and long dormant profile accounts and including them in their addressable audience. This means that when you as a brand would select your audience targeting during the initial campaign set-up, the number that you would see as your potential reach was incorrect. It had been inflated, accidentally at first, but then intentionally as Facebook continued to keep this information from their advertisers for several months after the fact.
So how do we differ? FieldTest finds your audience on the open internet. To put it more simply: no user logins means we don’t have to worry about monitoring multiple users, fake accounts or shadowy foreign organizations whose sole intention is to sow discord and confusion amongst users. To source our inventory, we work with all of the leading publisher exchanges who collectively represent hundreds of thousands of websites. Additionally, our partnerships with third party data companies help us further refine our search for your potential customers by leveraging the most engaging and cost effective audience segments available. The transparency that is important to know here is, one person with multiple devices (ie. smart phone, laptop, connected TV) can be counted multiple times, but we differentiate the two numbers by specifying the ‘Devices/Browsers’ in that audience versus the actual ‘Unique Individuals’. This is powerful because not only are we helping you identify your unique addressable audience, we’re also gaining insight into what your retargeting will look like and how best to approach things like ‘cross-device’ targeting.
Some might bring up the point that there is plenty of fake traffic on the internet, whether it be from bots, click farms or other disingenuous parties looking to inflate impressions and metrics. FieldTest factors that into the equation ahead of time. In fact, there are plenty of things (NSFW sites, bad data segments, anything dark web related) that are automatically blocked before your first dollar is spent with us. Add in integrations with companies like MOAT who, amongst other things, track viewable impressions and you have additional layers of security in place in your search for new customers.
One final failsafe worth mentioning: say, for the sake of argument, all of the above layers fail and bad data still gets through. What then? Because the vast majority of the campaigns that run through FieldTest have a hard conversion that the client is looking for (customer purchase, form submission, app install), all campaigns are ultimately being optimized for what is driving those actions. This means through both automatic and human campaign optimizations, if any bad data still finds its way through, it will be dealt with and turned away in the early stages of the ad buy along with all of the other items (ie. ad creatives, publishers) that aren’t seeing positive engagements.
The glaring issue with Facebook is they are going all in on their own data. The problem with this is, if that data fails or a portion of it is bad, it’s really up to them to identify it and make the correct decision to adjust it. This doesn’t mean that if you are running an ad campaign with Facebook that is seeing good results that you should discontinue; quite the opposite. But it does mean that making sure you are getting the whole picture, regardless of what vendor you are spending your budget with, is important when it comes to the decisions you make on behalf of your brand and your digital media spend.