Changes to Meta’s Aggregated Event Measurement
What is Aggregated Event Measurement?
With Apple tightening privacy restrictions for iPhone users over the past several years, Meta (then Facebook) introduced Aggregated Event Measurement for advanced advertising conversion tracking. With less browsing activity data passed from the Meta platform to websites in orders to follow the customer journey, Aggregated Event Measurement required advertisers to “rank” their Top 8 conversion events in order of importance to the business. Advertisers were mostly limited to these Top 8 events for targeting optimization.
For example, most e-commerce businesses would rank conversion events such as “purchase”, “add payment info”, “begin checkout” near the top of their Aggregated Event Top 8, with other valuable conversion actions such as “signup”, “subscribe”, “contact” mixed in logically.
Incorporating this Aggregated Event Measurement ranking was initially unclear, and somewhat confusing. It required intimate knowledge of Meta pixel tracking implementation, conversion tracking setup, confirmation of events being tracked and data flowing properly, and logically structuring conversion events within core buckets so as to inform the Top 8 list.
“Aggregated Event Measurement is designed to help keep people's data used to facilitate conversion reporting and ads optimization private. It will continue to evolve to help our advertisers support consumer privacy.”
What are the changes?
Without much context, Meta has recently changed the Aggregated Event Measurement System:
“You no longer need to prioritize 8 conversion events per domain for web conversion optimization, and you don’t need to turn on value sets in order to use value optimization.
The Aggregated Event Measurement tab in Meta Events Manager has been removed because you no longer need to configure your web events.”
On the one hand, it is somewhat mysterious why this change was made, and raises questions as to how Meta will continue to understand which conversion actions are most important to businesses going forward. On the other hand, when building new advanced advertising campaigns, advertisers are – and always have been – able to select specifically which conversion action is the priority for that specific campaign. So, the phasing out of Aggregated Event Measurement is just one less task advertisers need to complete, certainly a time saving!
Why does this matter?
At Double Tap Marketing, we believe no advertising dollar should be spent without the ability to track and analyze how it is performing. While Aggregated Event Measurement is no longer a required step in the conversion tracking setup, it does not mean Conversion Events need not be setup within Meta Events Manager – that remains how Meta can track the effectiveness of the ad for optimization, and how we can monitor conversions and thus, campaign performance.
Meta makes changes to the platform at the speed of light, only sometimes informing advertisers of said changes. Oftentimes, advertisers on Meta often become aware of platform changes only while in the midst of campaign setup and management. Always a fun experience to be on a client Zoom, screen-sharing while training clients how to use Meta’s advertising platform, and realizing live-time that it’s different than even the day before!
We stay on top of these changes to the advertising platform, as we work within the tools daily. Our ability to be constantly abreast of changes is something we feel is a responsibility and service to our clients who are mostly likely juggling so many hats within their small business that to remain on top of changes is simply impossible.
How can we help?
Looking for Meta Advertising Services for your winery, membership organization, small business, or non-profit? The team at Double Tap Marketing is here to help! Get in touch with us today.
Source: Meta Business Help Center