Facebook and Instagram Divorce Fallout: Changes to Reporting

Facebook announced a change to their reporting calculations that may have an impact on your ad campaigns. Users can now sever the connection between their Instagram and Facebook accounts, making for a potentially messy divorce when it comes to reporting.

What Changed?

Facebook has increased user control and privacy so they can now separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts. Users now have the option to be viewed as a unique user on each platform rather than Facebook identifying them in their data as one person.

What’s the Impact?

If you’re not running ads on Facebook or Instagram, or if you’re only running ads on one of those platforms, this doesn’t impact your campaigns.

If you’re running ads across Facebook and Instagram, you may see changes in reporting calculations and outcomes, including:

• Reporting on the exact reach of your ads may be inexact if it’s combined for both platforms. This is because it will count users once if their accounts are merged across Facebook and Instagram, and it will count users twice if they have separated those accounts as two unique users.
  
• It’s too early to know, but this change may be mitigated by severing API fields for Facebook and Instagram into distinct feeds and metrics. We will investigate this option in case any impact is perceived.
• Facebook anticipates an increase in pre-campaign estimated audience size, but they do not ultimately expect substantial impact on campaign reach. If there were an impact, it would be an artificial increase in reach as some account-severed users were counted twice.