Some Facebook and Instagram users, who were previously counted as one person when calculating advertising campaigns, will be counted as two – for a Facebook user and an Instagram user separately. Facebook said it will only merge the data if viewers of the ads on the two social networks merge their accounts. The change will affect Facebook’s ad performance scores.
“Starting today, if a person has not linked their Facebook and Instagram accounts in the account settings, we will assume that these are different people for the purposes of planning and measuring advertising campaigns,” – stated in the Facebook for Business blog. The company noted that it previously counted individual accounts as one person, including based on its own assumptions – for example, based on a single email address or installing two applications on different devices.
The change will not affect the accounting of people who linked Facebook and Instagram accounts – they will continue to be counted as one person for advertisers. The company warned that the change in methodology would lead to an increase in ad campaign forecasts, “including the size of the predicted audience.” Reach estimates, according to Facebook, for most campaigns “will not change significantly.”
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