Facebook’s metrics chief admits lack of ad measurement sensitivity

Brad Smallwood, VP of measurement and insights and head of the social media site’s marketing science team, has written an article in the Journal of Advertising Research: Resisting the siren call of popular digital measures: Facebook research shows no link between trendy online measures and ad effectiveness. 

In it, he describes Facebook’s initial struggles with assessing the value of key metrics, such as building a brand’s fan base and using the topic data. Following its own research, the social media site found those metrics to have no impact on brands’ performance, and has subsequently lowered the status of metrics such as ‘likes', ‘shares', and message posts. 

"At Facebook, although we are proud of diminishing the stature of irrelevant metrics, we share the responsibility for some that still litter your dashboards," Smallwood wrote. 

"We are determined to move forward, look for real measures of value instead of proxies, and move away from the CPM economy to the value economy.

"It will take courage, effort, and science to abandon the comfort of the easily measured and replace it with the relentless focus on value. When this is achieved, however, marketing will have the tools to drive organic revenue growth and the authority to lead our organisations forward." 

In his article, Smallwood encourages C-suite executives to become more data-literate and elevate the role of analytics in the decision-making process.