Facebook unveils 'Lift API' to compete with measurement tools

Facebook is launching a new measurement tool, Lift API, that lets marketers create their own brand-lift studies to measure campaigns and ad effectiveness. The social media giant is also testing new fields and categories in its ad reporting so that advertisers can measure which ads lead to conversions across multiple devices. Facebook is following in the footsteps of Snapchat and Foursquare and other tech vendors who have recently increased their measurement offerings.

In the digital ads world, the past few months have been all about emerging measurement tools . With that in mind, Facebook today is announcing two intriguing initiatives that it is characterizing as tests.

The first is called Lift API, which will let many more advertisers, Facebook's marketing partners and other third-party measurement partners create their own lift studies for conversion rates, sales and mobile app installs. It builds on the Lift measurement tool the social media giant initially announced in January 2015, which has since been employed by more than 1,000 businesses in various industries to gauge Facebook ads' effectiveness across their objectives.