A few weeks ago, I wrote about reporting metrics that are not available in the new Adwords UI. It wasn’t long thereafter that I saw this little notice in Facebook Ads Manager:
Similar to what we saw with Adwords, Facebook is cleaning out reporting metrics that are either redundant or under-utilized and will not be available after the next API update in July.
Redundant or Irrelevant Metrics
Here is a chart which shows metrics that fall into this category and what you should replace them with.
| Metric Being Removed | Use this Instead |
| Button Clicks | Use Link Clicks, Event Responses or Offers Saved |
| Positive Feedback, Negative Feedback | Relevance Score |
| Actions, People Taking Action, Cost per Any Action | None. Customize Your Own Metrics as Needed Instead |
| Mobile App Actions Conversion Value | Mobile App Purchases Conversion Value |
Let’s take a look at what these look like in some of my campaigns. I am including ads for a variety of campaign objectives so you can see the metrics across differing types.
Button clicks only show people who actually clicked on the call to action button (if you have one included. In the above post engagement ad, a button was not included). You can see the ad focused on link clicks, only a small percentage of people clicked on the button itself. These button clicks are rolled into Link Clicks, so Facebook is considering them redundant.
Next, let’s look at the Positive and Negative Feedback metrics. In the above examples, you can see that the first two have the same medium positive feedback and low negative feedback, but have very different relevant scores. Since relevance score is comprised of these two feedback components and ad performance, I can tell that the first is underperforming to get a lower relevance score and therefore will lose out to other ads for the same target audience. Facebook believes breaking these out for advertisers to view only creates confusion. I’m not so sure about that. High negative feedback indicates that the ad either doesn’t resonate with the target audience or you aren’t targeting the right audience. It’s helpful to know and it’s unfortunate that this data will be going away.
Lastly, any existing metric surrounding “actions” will be going as well. Since actions are a roll-up of engagement, clicks or conversions for the ad, these can be instead broken out as needed for your campaign type. Instead of looking at actions going forward, start now to look at the specific metric that matters most for the campaign objective. You can also create custom conversions as needed for your business model.
Outdated Metrics
The following metrics are considered to be unmeaningful or irrelevant. In the case of link click destination, mobile operating system updates often prevented the accuracy of this metric and Facebook continues to seek workarounds specifically for insights into app deep link or app store destinations.
| Metric Being Removed | Use this Instead |
| Link Click Destination | Outbound Clicks and Landing Page Views |
| Page Mentions, Cost per Page Mention | Page Likes or Page Engagement |
| Page Tab Views, Cost per Page Tab View | Page Likes or Page Engagement |
| Social Reach, Social Impressions, Social Clicks (All), Unique Social Clicks (All) | Reach instead of Social Reach, and using Impressions instead of Social Impressions |
Here are how these look for some of my ads:
I don’t have results in these ad examples for page mentions or tab views at all and I don’t believe I’ve ever really used these stats before. The social metrics are based on the buckets of people who saw social information with the ad. Since advertisers have no control over when the ads do or don’t include the social information, we can’t really use these metrics to make decisions for the ads. They are more of a “for your information” stat that isn’t overly helpful to most advertisers.
Under-Utilized
| Metric Being Removed | Use this Instead |
| Carousel Card for conversions or calculated values (like CTR) | Link Clicks metric broken down by Carousel Card |
| Canvas Component Time Percentage | Canvas View Time or Canvas View Percentage |
| Amount Spent Today | Use the dynamic date selector to see results for Today |
I’m surprised that the breakdown for carousel card by conversions or other calculated values is considered to be under-utilized. To see this breakdown, go to your Ads Manager, then select “Carousel Engagement” from the Column dropdown. Now from the Breakdown dropdown, go down to Action, then select “Carousel Card.”
After July, Link Clicks will be the only metric still shown via this drop down. You’ll still be able to see conversions for your carousel ad rolled up, just not for each card of the ad.
Conclusion
You can read about these changes directly from Facebook. Although it’s never ideal for reporting metrics to be taken away, we can only hope that they will be replaced with new metrics that are even more beneficial and insightful that the lost ones won’t be missed. To make sure you are on top of everything on Facebook, check out our all-encompassing Facebook Ad Resources and Guide.
Which metrics will you miss? We’d love to hear your opinion in the comments below!
