DTC Brands Trust Unbiased Experiments and Source-of-Truth Reporting to Inform Facebook Ad Investments

As advertising platforms grapple with the measurement fallout of increasing restrictions on data and tracking, Measured has launched the industry’s first end-to-end incrementality measurement and reporting solution for Facebook in a post-iOS 14.5 world.

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“Although Hammitt only started with Measured less than a year ago, their scientific method is just what is needed to scale profitably – in spite of privacy changes, which I support”

Facebook recently indicated that the platform’s measurement and reporting systems are suffering accuracy issues related to updates in recent versions of Apple’s iOS. Facebook believes that “real world conversions, like sales and app installs, are higher than what is being reported for many advertisers.”

Experiments from Measured provide DTC brands like Birdies, Fabletics, Lulus, and Stance with reliable ongoing insights into Facebook incrementality at channel, campaign and ad set levels. By measuring the true incremental contribution of Facebook media, anchored on source-of-truth transaction data provided by the brand, marketers can make informed decisions about budget allocation – even amid rising concerns about the reliability of platform self-reporting.

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“Privacy-driven changes across the industry are causing widespread reporting headaches for platforms and forcing brands to adapt how they track and measure,” said Madan Bharadwaj, CTO and cofounder of Measured. “We built Measured in anticipation of this moment. We continuously refine our experiment designs and adapt to inevitable changes by platforms to ensure brands can always trust insights they get from us.”

Apple’s tracking policies pressured Facebook to make multi-faceted changes to attribution capabilities it offers advertisers, including a significant scale-back in conversion lift-testing and the elimination of 28-day click-through and view-through attribution windows. The decrease in trackable data has caused a notable drop in attribution reporting from the platform and the shorter look-back periods make it exponentially more difficult to run statistically significant split-audience test and control experiments.

In the wake of these iOS-related implications, Measured developed a new suite of experiment designs and actionable reporting tools that identify the causality between Facebook investments and actual business transactions reported by the brand, empowering marketers to make confident decisions about advertising on the platform.

Audience split experiments – Measured’s proprietary methodology utilizes the Facebook audience split API to divide target audiences into test and control cohorts and apply systematic lift studies to get program-level and granular ad set-level incrementality measurements.

Geo-matched market experiments – Using advanced matched-market data science, Measured identifies statistically significant sibling markets (geos), at the state, DMA or zip code level, that are similar but cheaper to test in than larger markets. Because geo experiments are based on source-of-truth transaction data from the business (e.g. ecommerce platform) and run completely independent of platform reporting, geo-testing is the only system of measurement that isn’t affected by platform and policy changes.

Scale testing experiments – To test for scale, Measured splits target audiences into three cohorts – test, control, and scale. The ad sets used for the test group are cloned and served to the scale group, but at 2x-3x-4x the spend, to measure the point of audience saturation.

“Although Hammitt only started with Measured less than a year ago, their scientific method is just what is needed to scale profitably – in spite of privacy changes, which I support,” said Tony Drockton, Founder of Hammitt, an emerging leader in the luxury handbag market. “Great brands will prosper in these times with a clear vision, great partners like Measured, and by approaching digital media as a permission-based win-win between their customers and the brands they love.”

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