Facebook’s rolling out a new tab called ‘Recent Ad Activity’, which will enable users to view any of the ads they’ve clicked, Liked, commented on or shared on the platform, which could help improve the attribution of Facebook ad performance.
The feature was first spotted by Devesh Logendran and Facebook has now confirmed that the tab has been rolled out to all US users, with Facebook currently assessing which other regions they want to test the tool in.
As you can see from the screenshots, the option is listed in the features menu – click on it and you’ll be shown a listing of all the ads you’ve interacted within over the past three months.
The tool will also give users the capacity to save ads, with a specific tab dedicated to saved ad content, making it easier to keep track of things that may have caught your eye.
It’s an interesting addition – on the surface, it seems fairly minor, but the wider implications or advertisers could be significant.
As noted by TechCrunch, one of the issues it may help resolve is attribution – right now, if you remember an ad you saw on Facebook and you want to go back and give it a second look, you probably won’t be able to find it, which likely then leads you to Google to track the relevant product down. Analytics would then attribute that traffic to Google, a common issue with last-click attribution, which potentially skews your data and has you focused on the wrong sources.
Having the ability to go back and check your ad activity could help resolve this, while the ability to save ads also provides increased capacity for keeping track of relevant offers. Of course, you’ve been able to save ad links for some time, but having all your ad activity in one place could make it an easier reference point.
It may also help provide Facebook with more data. The Social Network is obviously already tracking all this activity, but it will now also be able to measure re-visits to ads, which likely helps boost re-targeting. Someone who’s checked out your ads two or three times is likely a stronger prospect – the option will give Facebook more capacity to track such behavior.
If it catches on, the new tools could provide significant benefit to advertisers, while also giving Facebook more data to show correlations between Facebook ads and actual response – an area Facebook’s very keen to improve on.
The new option is currently only available in the US, with a wider roll-out coming.