Comment by itake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by itake | Hacker News Reader

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Facebook, Google[0], Yelp, and every other digital advertiser define "impression" as a view, not a unique human. If Facebook did anything other than that, then that could be considered misleading.

We already discussed: "The number of people who saw your ads at least once."

Facebook provides a link to what they define is "people" and provide an example of this specific situation we are discussing [1]. We can even look back to Dec 2020 to see this definition [2], which is way before the announcement published.

Unfortunately, Facebook seems to of shuffled around their biz documentation page, so I can't easily find a direct source on wayback machine, but reachlocal.com in 2017 [3] published a blog article describing Facebook impressions as per view.

Please explain what there is to be mad about? There are no definition changes. Advertisers have always known that impressions were views. Advertisers have always known that there can be duplicate "reaches" due to 1 human managing multiple accounts (biz vs personal).

[0] - https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6320?hl=en [1] - https://www.facebook.com/business/help/283579896000936 [2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20201223180727/https://www.faceb... [3] - https://blog.reachlocal.com/facebook-advertising-terms-you-n...

Again, there ARE definition changes.

From [1] (an article you referenced):

> When a person has more than one account and takes > actions (such as liking photos or adding comments) on the separate accounts, these actions may be counted separately even though they were made by the same person.

Notice the "may be counted" part (which is pretty vague and it's hard to argue the definition hasn't changed on a vague statement). Judging by the their latest announcement [2], by mentioning "may be counted" in [1], they probably meant this:

- If that persons' email was the same on two or more accounts, or they used the same mobile device, we'll count it as the one person

- Otherwise, we'll count it as a different person

Again, I'm quoting this part from [2]:

> For example, if someone used the same email address across their Facebook and Instagram accounts or accessed both platforms from the same device, we counted them as one person when they interacted with ads.

The definition of "may be counted" will essentially change after Facebook implements their counting update to:

- If a person didn't link their accounts under "Accounts Center", we'll count them as 2 people

- Otherwise we'll count them as one person

So Facebook won't make any attempts to implicitly associate 2 accounts as 1 person using emails/device IDs as they did in the past.

Based on the available data, the definition of what Facebook counts as a "unique person" HAS changed.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/283579896000936

[2] https://www.facebook.com/business/news/an-update-on-how-we-c...

I mean, yeah... FB made an announcement informing everyone that there was a change. I don't see how this requires us to grab our pitch forks over Facebook trying to protect user privacy and making a negligible change to an estimated derivative advertising metric.

Advertisers already know that Facebook may double count unique humans (confirmed by the Dec 2020 documentation). No one is double billed. No one is misled. Facebook is being very transparent here. There isn't anything to see here.

I think that this is driven by joint FB-IG campaigns. Before this change, if they believed that it was the same user (presumably through some kind of model), they counted a pair of accounts as 1 person.

After this change, they would count them as 2, given that the accounts aren't officially linked. To be fair, I suspect that an awful lot of accounts (at least in my circle) are linked as I see a bunch of posts on FB which come from IG.

Overall, this seems pretty sensible. All other things being equal, you'll see an increase in actions per unique people, but given that most advertisers use CPA to track performance, this shouldn't really be a big deal.

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