Meta needs to display organic results…
This is something that has bothered me for years. The results we see in Ads Manager are incomplete, and not just because of issues related to 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. It’s because we’re missing an important element.
All of the results you see in Ads Manager are from people you paid to reachReach measures the number of Accounts Center Accounts (formerly users) that saw your ads at least once. You can have one account reached with multiple impressions. More. This makes sense, of course, but it doesn’t reflect the full impact of your ads — especially if you have an ad that’s engaging or even goes viral.
If you have an effective ad, the audienceThis is the group of people who can potentially see your ads. You help influence this by adjusting age, gender, location, detailed targeting (interests and behaviors), custom audiences, and more. More of people who will see it grows. It isn’t limited to only the people you paid to reach. Those people you paid to reach could share it. Or they comment on your ad and their friends see it.
What happens when those other people, whom you didn’t pay to reach, end up converting? When it comes to Ads Manager, these organic 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 didn’t happen.
This is information that Meta has. I’ve long suggested we should even see this in our organic post results if we have a pixel and events set up. But let’s focus on the organic engagement with ads for now. We should be able to see this information in Ads Manager.
Organic results obviously shouldn’t be included in the default view of Ads Manager. That could be seen as misleading. But, what if Meta offered a breakdownBreakdown is a way to get insights into your ad performance related to time, delivery, action, or dynamic creative element. More for paid and organic results? It could generate separate rows:
1. Results for the people you paid to reach
2. Results for the people who engaged organically
And, I know, this goes way outside of how Ads Manager works now. Breakdowns are typically only for segmenting the paid results you’re already seeing. This would end up surfacing new information.
Still, this could give us a much fuller picture of the impact of our ads. In some cases, the paid impact by itself may not have been all that convincing. But, including organic results may make it a winner.
You can do something similar with URL parameters and GA4, of course. Google Analytics won’t know whether the person on your website is there because you paid to reach them or not. It just knows that a link that includes your URL parameters was clicked.
It would be nice if Ads Manager offered this, too, especially since it could separate paid from organic.
What do you think?
