Facebook updates video ad metrics & adds Moat as measurement partner

Adver­tis­ers will soon be able to use Moat’s mea­sure­ment plat­form to ver­i­fy Face­book’s new Video Play metric.

Face­book is mak­ing adjust­ments to the way it mea­sures video ads, offer­ing a new met­ric, remov­ing oth­ers and bring­ing in a new third-par­ty mea­sure­ment solu­tion for video advertisers.

Unrepeated watch time reported

Based on feed­back from adver­tis­ers, Face­book says it is chang­ing the way its 3‑second and 10-sec­ond video view counts are cal­cu­lat­ed. Before today, these met­rics includ­ed time accu­mu­lat­ed if a view­er rewound or rewatched a video. Now, the 3‑second and 10-sec­ond video view met­rics will only include unre­peat­ed sec­onds of watch time.

“Busi­ness­es have told us they’d pre­fer that these two met­rics only count unre­peat­ed sec­onds watched to more accu­rate­ly mea­sure con­sump­tion, so we’ll be updat­ing how we cal­cu­late these two met­rics across all video report­ing in Ads Man­ag­er and Page Insights to no longer incor­po­rate watch sec­onds from rewind­ing,” Face­book writes in the announce­ment on its busi­ness blog.

New Video Plays metric & Moat verification

Face­book is also launch­ing a new Video Plays met­ric in the Ads Man­ag­er and Ads API that bet­ter reflects actu­al video plays ver­sus impres­sions cal­cu­lat­ed when a video dis­plays in the News Feed but doesn’t play.

Because Face­book gives mar­keters the option to include a cus­tomized thumb­nail image on video ads in cas­es where a video may not play, video ad impres­sion counts include video ads that earn impres­sions but do not get played. (Face­book clar­i­fied that a video may not play in cas­es where a user has auto­play turned off or when a phone has a low bat­tery or poor con­nec­tion.) The new Video Plays met­ric only cal­cu­lates actu­al plays of a video — not impres­sions of videos left unplayed.

The com­pa­ny says adver­tis­ers will soon have the option to use Moat to ver­i­fy the new Video Plays met­ric. Already one of Facebook’s third-par­ty mea­sure­ment part­ners, Ora­cle Data Cloud’s Moat will use its own method­ol­o­gy to deter­mine Face­book video ad plays.

Removing 2 more metrics

While Face­book adver­tis­ers are gain­ing new ways to track and ver­i­fy video ad plays, there are two spe­cif­ic met­rics they’re los­ing: 30-Sec­ond Video View and Video Per­cent­age Watched. Accord­ing to Face­book, the two met­rics are being removed because they are redun­dant with oth­er avail­able met­rics and are infre­quent­ly used. In Feb­ru­ary, the com­pa­ny removed 20 adver­tis­ing met­rics from its reporting.

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