For marketers who are trying to make an impact with their online advertising campaign, the best options are to work with Google or Facebook. Between these two giants of the internet, there advertising network covers more than half of the online advertising options for most consumers on the internet. Keeping up with this many advertisements can be tough, which is why Facebook announced a new way for marketers to understand their ads and make comparisons when necessary.

In a statement they made earlier this week, Facebook explained, “We’ve launched several updates to our reporting tools that are designed to make it easier for you to measure ad performance across accounts, channels, and different publishers. Using these updates, you can get a better holistic picture of how your ads are performing, what channels are driving conversions and what audiences you are actually reaching during the holiday season.”

One of the new options that can help marketers is the creation of online testing for cross-account reporting and the introduction of custom metrics. With cross-account reporting, marketers will be able to see metrics, such as the reach, impressions, and conversions, all for multiple ad accounts. This reporting service can turn your services into a one-stop-shop for a clear, concise report on a business’ performance. This updated system will allow marketers to save time that was previously spent manually building reports that were separated into different ad types. 

This new idea from Facebook also shows de-duplicated reach (i.e., the unique people reached across accounts and campaigns), so it’s easier to help marketers identify and reach potential targets. With these tools, it can be easier to better understand marketers target audience and how well these tools efforts are going for reaching and the accuracy of your ad targeting campaigns.

Another element of this change comes from Facebook’s plan to include custom metrics that can also be used to test the effect of certain parts of the campaign. With Facebook’s new custom metric building feature, marketers can this feature to formulate and save metrics. This tool will unlock a more seamless process for assessing and optimizing campaigns by allowing marketers to build better reports that are more tailored to your personal business goals.

The marketing tools mentioned above can be used to help marketers with Conversion Paths, which is a similar cross-comparison tool that Facebook experimented with year. Conversion Path is a publisher-level conversion path report in Facebook Attribution. Customers often have multiple interactions across channels and devices before visiting a website and ultimately converting, but these interactions are not necessarily reflected by simple revenue or conversion reporting.

According to a Facebook-commissioned Ipsos study in 2018, shoppers used a variety of channels, from online to print to television, to shop and get inspiration for holidays gifts. By measuring the Conversion Path that led a sale. Marketers will use these tools to ensure that they understand the most important conversion paths across the various channels and publishers.

For more recent ways that Facebook has enhanced social media marketing, read this article on some recent updates from the company.