When you first start with Northbeam, you might notice that your performance numbers are different in our dashboard vs an in-platform
When you first start with Northbeam, you might notice that your performance numbers are different in our dashboard vs an in-platform dashboard like Facebook Ads Manager. In fact, often you’ll find that Northbeam reports worse performance than Facebook Ads Manager does; what’s going on here?
iOS 14 Changed Everything
Prior to the release of iOS 14, Facebook was able to track the entire customer journey up to the conversion. This included: View Content, Add to Cart, Checkout, and eventually Purchase.
With access to all of this data, media buyers could effectively target ads and reach audiences without much difficulty. However, after iOS 14 was released, Facebook was limited to only Purchase data meaning they had to start using a proababilisitc model to try and guess which touchpoints were driving purchases. Not only is this less accurate, Facebook also recommends you wait 72 hours before looking at performance. This reporting lag is less than ideal with many media buyers looking to real-time data on performance.
Northbeam’s Approach
While Facebook uses a simple last-click attribution model, Northbeam uses multi-touch attribution models powered by machine learning to assign proper credit to marketing touchpoints, giving you a clearer picture of what’s really going on.
Facebook tends to inflate performance (so you’ll increase spend) and give their own products favorable impact scores, whereas Northbeam aims to provide you an objective view of your marketing campaigns. That’s because we rely on first-party data, not third-party data when building our attribution models.
We aim to give you the most accurate view of your data possible so you can find actionable insights.