Facebook Climbs to 1.59B Users, Beats Q4 Estimates with $5.8B Revenue
The big question mark for me is whether FB will be the advertising giant to finally crack the attribution nut.<p>You see, the age old problem of &quot;I know I&#x27;m wasting half my budget, I just don&#x27;t know which half&quot; is still alive and well.  These days, we have SO MUCH data about cross-channel attribution that it can be hard to plot a path forward (and that&#x27;s if you are even aware of this concept and its implications).<p>For those who are savvy, display and video CPMs might seem a bit inflated right now.  There is a major opportunity to leverage analytics to prove to advertisers the incremental lift of their display and branding efforts.  Dedicated attribution services like VisualIQ, Adometry, and Convertro have been getting snapped up by big advertisers, but so far nothing has really reached the SMB and mid-market level for solution pricing.<p>I&#x27;d LOVE to spend more of my budget on FB and display, but when they mix view-throughs in with click conversions by default, that raises red flags.  What is the value of a view-through? It is sure as heck not 100% attribution credit, which is what the default would place it at.<p>Attribution is a super deep and very complex subject (and one I&#x27;m very passionate about).  Getting better visibility is my top priority for 2016 as it is many other advertisers.  Structuring proper tests is unfortunately not just a software issue, particularly with smaller businesses with less data as you need to control for many factors.<p>That said, Google has fired the first shots in this fight with their awesome basic attribution tools in GA that they give away FOR FREE.  I&#x27;m dying to see what they do with their Adometry acquisition and whether they will make that available to the masses.<p>FB has a huge opportunity here and I know they&#x27;ve been making inroads in this area with Atlas, but I&#x27;d personally love to see them release &quot;Facebook Analytics&quot; as a direct competitor to Google Analytics, and make a real effort to prove the value of their inventory from an incremental lift&#x2F;attribution standpoint.<p>I&#x27;d LOVE to spend more on branding if I could be more certain of the actual impact it is making to allow me to justify the budget I&#x27;m putting towards it compared against more directly measurable options lower in the funnel (like some aspects of paid search, which has its own attribution issues).  The tools just aren&#x27;t there though.<p>If FB can provide advertisers with the tools to more definitively say &quot;this is making you money&quot; and not just &quot;oh, we summed up all these random stats and call it Engagement--look at the shiny engagement metric!&quot; I&#x27;m confident they would find advertisers even more willing to open their wallets, shift spend away from the GDN and exchanges, and stop questioning or caring about click fraud since it would be a self-correcting issue (ie. high levels of click fraud would in theory result in lower perceived incremental lift if proper analysis was conducted).<p>If you are at FB and touch Insights or anything related to attribution on Atlas, please dear god contact me--I live right near HQ and would LOVE to have a deep conversation on how to improve this for advertisers.