Unless you’ve been living in a colony on Mars, you’ve probably heard the cries of a million lost souls refreshing their Facebook and Instagram over and over again waiting for it to come back online.
But this outage didn’t just impact users wanting to desperately view their feeds. The outage will have a direct impact on every advertiser using Facebook’s services to reach customers.
Most importantly, this means your Attribution will be off for a few days.
The events that Facebook uses for campaign conversions – /Landing Page Views/, /App Installs/, /Registrations/, /Subscription Starts/, /Purchases/, etc – these all rely on your apps/web firing a successful call to Facebooks server. We believe this was impacted for many clients.
Are your conversion events impacted?
We looked at acquisition campaigns across over 50 ad accounts and compared today’s performance to previous Mondays and the last 30 days overall. When we examine the ratio of Facebook Link Clicks in their network to Landing Page Views and App Installs, we saw a dip today in that ratio that was almost 25% lower than we’d have expected. This means that if 100 clicks normally generated 80 landing page views, today we only saw 60 landing page views.
What does this mean for you?
Most of all, don’t freak out (or stop freaking out if already have!). You might have noticed your funnel wasn’t performing as well as usual, but our research shows that it’s proportionally true across the board. Facebook’s numbers will just be off, and your conversion rates probably haven’t precipitously dropped. For this time period, the numbers will just be off, and by our analysis, off by approximately 25%. But even more importantly, even if you’re really smart when it comes to managing your exclusion lists, Facebook is likely to keep targeting customers by mistake who were converted during this time.
What about the impact on your CPA?
If your Facebook campaign is optimized to a conversion event and Facebook doesn’t receive a conversion event for a particular customer then they will usually continue to advertise to that customer even after they’ve converted. This could be happening for your converted users today (even users who seemingly joined today from other channels). And this would raise your CPAs as you continued to spend on users who already joined.
What should you do about it?
We recommend refreshing your exclusions lists in Facebook with all new users who converted today (regardless of channel).
