Facebook announced removing the 28 days attribution window option in their Facebook ads. It means that advertisers won’t be able to track actions directly anymore.
Attribution models make advertisers able to measure particular responses based on rules made by the advertiser to their campaigns.
“For example, if you were to select ‘purchase’ as your conversion, and apply this default attribution model and attribution window, your reporting will reflect purchases that can be attributed by Facebook to the last ad click that happened within 28 days prior to purchase or the last ad impression that occurred within 1 day of purchase, whichever happened last.”
Basically, they use touchpoints specifies in the process of your advertising to give more insights on your response metric. Somehow, this makes marketers able to collect more information on the influence your ads have made based on the element you focus on.
However, currently, the capacity is going to be more limited. As per the Search Engine Journal, Facebook contacted advertisers to tell them about the change directly, clarifying that:
“Upcoming digital privacy initiatives affecting multiple browsers will limit business’s ability to measure people’s interactions across domains and devices. Among those limitations is the ability for businesses to attribute conversion events back to an ad over longer attribution windows.”
Therefore, thanks to changes in the policy of tracking data, Facebook won’t be able to offer the 28-day window anymore. Instead, there will be a limited overview of seven days of direct response performance.
This change will apparently only influence expert Facebook marketers and the advertisers who operate large campaigns. On the other hand, it will impact automated systems that determine the spending of Facebook ads based on specific events.
These changes will work from the 12th of October, and all the historical information will be accessible until that day. If you have used attribution models before, it might be good if you downloaded your data to track the historic performance.