Heading up to the launch of Aggregated Event MeasurementAggregated Event Measurement is Meta's protocol for handling tracking opt-outs from iOS devices. AEM initially required advertisers to configure and rank eight events and verify their website, but those requirements were removed in 2023. Aggregated Event Measurement still exists, but Meta handles it on the back-end to comply with Apple requirements on privacy. More and the enforcement of other changes related to iOS 14, one of the biggest things we heard repeated was that we needed to give thought to ranking our eight pixel eventsPixel events allow you to track specific actions on your website that can be used for reporting, targeting, and optimization. More because changing them would be problematic.
Well, Facebook appears to have made a change here — at least a change that is reflected in their own documentation. Let’s take a closer look at the 72-hour pause, how documentation reads now, and how to address this going forward.
The 72-Hour Pause
In prior posts and training, I’ve advocated for assembling an 8-event ranking that is flexible and can continue to be usable six months or a year from now. I suggested grouping purchase events by category as an example, rather than relying only on the Purchase standard event.
Why? Because any change to your ranking of those events could have a significant — and annoying — impact on the delivery of your ads.
How would this be applied? It would appear that adding a new event, changing the order, and removing an event from the ranking could potentially result in significant disruption.
Advertisers approached this with extreme caution. No one wanted a 72-hour pause.
The Update to Facebook Documentation
Facebook documentation has been updated to reflect a softer handling of changes to your event ranking.
You can submit changes to your web event configuration once every 72 hours. When you confirm your changes, ad setsAn ad set is a Facebook ads grouping where settings like targeting, scheduling, optimization, and placement are determined. More immediately start optimizing for the new event configuration.
So, now it would appear that you can make these changes without disruption. The caveat, of course, is that once you make a change to event ranking you won’t be able to make another change for 72 hours.
Given that advertisers have been conditioned to not make any changes ever under threat of 72-hour pause, I don’t think most will mind being limited to making changes once every three days.
72-Hour Pause for App Advertising
An important distinction, however, is that while the delay has been scrubbed from Facebook documentation related to Aggregated Event Measurement, it still exists for SKAdnetwork. This is the protocol used for handling users who opted out of tracking for app advertising.
If you run ads to promote app installs and engagement, this applies to you. If you don’t, you can ignore this part.
From that same article:
If you change the priority order or remove an event, impacted ads and ad sets are paused for 72 hours to eliminate the risk of incorrect attributionAttribution is how Meta gives credit to an ad for a conversion. Your Attribution Setting determines how your ad will be delivered and the reporting attribution window. The default Attribution Setting is 7-day click and 1-day view, which means that anyone who converts within 7 days of clicking or 1 day of viewing your ad will be counted as a conversion. More.
Again, this is for app advertising only, not for optimizing for and tracking website conversionsA conversion is counted whenever a website visitor performs an action that fires a standard event, custom event, or custom conversion. Examples of conversions include purchases, leads, content views, add to cart, and registrations. More.
Should You Make Changes?
The confusing part, of course, is that I still get the 72-hour pause warning when I look to make changes. The screen shot I shared above was from today, not the distant past. My assumption is that this alert simply needs to be updated.
It’s also possible that this change hasn’t been completely rolled out yet. Something to keep in mind before you test this update. It’s possible that while Facebook’s official stand is that a 72-hour pause will not occur, it hasn’t been applied globally yet.
Worst case scenario, you may want to consider testing this only if a 72-hour pause isn’t a significant risk. You may need to optimize for something else for a short period of time.
Have you made changes to your 8-event ranking lately? Did it result in a pause?
Let me know in the comments below!
