This document describes ad measurement, filtration and reporting methodologies for Audience Network ad impressions. It addresses how Audience Network complies with the IAB Ad Impression Measurement Guidelines, the MRC Minimum Standards and the MRC Invalid Traffic Detection and Filtration Guidelines Addendum (Version 1.0, 15 October 2015).

Facebook employs "General Invalid Traffic Detection" techniques as defined by the MRC's Invalid Traffic Detection and Filtration Guidelines Addendum.

Overview

Facebook is an online social networking service headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The company's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. The platform enables people to consume content via the News Feed, chat with friends via Facebook Messenger, create personal (and business) profile Pages, and also share photos and videos and join various groups.

Audience Network allows advertisers to extend their ad campaigns beyond Facebook. This means that they can reach their target audiences on websites and apps across devices such as computers, mobile devices and connected TVs.

Audience Network uses Facebook targeting, measurement and delivery to make sure that each ad helps advertisers reach their campaign goals at the most cost-effective price.

Ad placements and ad types

Audience Network has three primary ad placements that are applicable to the MRC accreditation. Ads are displayed in:

• Native, banner and interstitial units that run in mobile app and mobile web environments
• In-stream video units that run on both desktop and mobile environments (web and app)
• Rewarded video units that run in mobile app environments

Ads Manager is a self-service interface. It enables advertisers to create and run ads, target ads, set and configure ad budgets, and view reporting.

More information about Ads Manager can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/home/

The Marketing API enables advertisers to programmatically access Facebook's advertising platform from their own advertising tools. This gives developers access to all the functionality available in Facebook tools, but from their own custom solutions.

More information about the Marketing API can be found here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-apis

Audience Network is available to advertisers as a set of placements to select in Ads Manager.

More information about placements can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/business/products/ads/how-ads-show

Methodologies in detail

Ad measurement metrics

Audience Network's reporting system counts ad impressions delivered and measured across all ad placements on desktop and mobile properties off-Facebook:

• Native, banner and interstitial
• In-stream video
• Rewarded video

To review available ad metrics and learn how users are reaching their business goals, see the Guide to Reports in Ads Manager in the Facebook Help Centre. Depending on how a customer sets up their ad campaigns, some data might not be collected or may not be available.

Ad impression management

On Audience Network, an ad impression is counted the instant any part of the ad appears on the user's screen.

A JavaScript-based check is performed every 250 milliseconds to determine if the ad has met the requirements for measurement: greater than zero pixels and greater than zero seconds.

Note: This additional check step does not exist for certain platforms because Facebook can't detect when ads become viewable on-screen. As a result, the pixel is fired as soon as they are rendered. These platforms and devices only account for a small percentage of ads served on Audience Network.

Additionally, Audience Network supports VAST-only server-side integrations where impressions are logged the instant the ad appears on-screen and is delivered to Facebook from the client.

Audience Network allows certain third-party ad tracking tags (Doubleclick, Atlas, etc.) to be included with ads, but all ads are served via the Facebook ad server. There is no empty frame to serve dynamic ads.

Compound tracking

We do not use compound tracking. Each impression event is individually recorded and measured.

Offline measurement

Offline impressions are stored and re-sent once the user is back online. This must occur within twenty four hours of the impression event otherwise it is marked as non-billable.

Auto-refresh

Audience Network may auto-refresh banner ads by default, but does not auto-refresh any other types of ad. New ads must be triggered by an additional ad request. This is controlled by the publisher.

Cache-busting

Cache-busting is a technique for preventing a web browser from reusing an ad that it has already shown to someone. It forces the browser to request a new ad each time the page refreshes.

Audience Network makes use of the cache-control http header to prevent caching on dynamic pages:

cache-control:private, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate

Additionally, the client impression timestamp is included in the request (via the "cts" parameter). This helps reduce caching in the same manner that a random number would.

Data logging and processing

Each call to Audience Network's http service generates a logging event that is processed through the stream processing infrastructure. These logging events reach the Facebook reporting service. The data is aggregated and stored in the Facebook data warehouse. Customers can create and schedule reports based on this aggregated data.

All impressions are stored in the ad logs and counted as "raw" statistics. Facebook processes the raw logs, flags some of the events as non-billable based on a list of rules and outputs the raw data as annotated logs.

Known limitations

We believe that these limitations are insignificant:

• Caching: We use appropriate cache-busting techniques. However, it is not possible to prevent all caching.
• Abandonment: Abandonment is a known measurement limitation. Because Audience Network does not generally record the ad impression until it enters the viewport, the impact is believed to be insignificant.
• Ad blocking tools (desktop only): Audience Network has not implemented any mechanisms to prevent ads blocked via AdBlock and AdBlock Plus from being measured as billable impressions.
• Image rendering disabled: Browsers with images disabled (desktop and mobile web) may result in ad impressions and feed impressions being measured that did not have the opportunity to be seen.
• JavaScript disabled or incapable browsers (desktop only): Audience Network ads do not load if JavaScript has not been enabled. We do not serve ads to Internet Explorer versions 9 or earlier.

Other technology issues and limitations

• Google's Chrome browser has pre-rendering functionality which may overstate impressions (desktop only).
• Audience Network's impression measurement does not consider the placement of other windows that might be open on the user's screen. If a user were to place another window over an ad (or even move the browser window off-screen), we are not able to detect this.
• Some feature phones do not support the viewport measurement methodology and employ a "rendered" methodology.

Partner qualification controls and material business relationships

For the purposes of this document, Audience Network is the "ad server". The "publishers" are the organisations that run the apps, websites and other digital properties to which Audience Network ads are delivered.

Publishers who are on Audience Network must adhere to the Facebook Audience Network Policy. Unless apps have prior approval, Audience Network is only available to apps offered in Apple iTunes or Google Play.

Audience Network for Mobile Web Display is currently only available to select head-of-market (HOM) publishers via header bidding. HOM publishers are generally part of a larger media company, have a recognised brand, original quality content, real audiences and a direct sales team. New publishers will have to be approved by the regional lead and the publisher experience manager.

Companies must register with Facebook and provide their company name, company type, address, contact details, tax ID number(s), tax ID type and banking information.

All activity on Audience Network is analysed using Facebook proprietary tools, third-party tools and human review for authenticity. Payment is only made for valid impressions.

Additionally, Facebook does not "acquire" or purchase traffic.

Filtration methodology

Audience Network uses techniques based on identifiers, activity and patterns from data in the log files to detect and remove invalid activity. This includes – but is not limited to – known and suspected non-human activity and suspected invalid human activity.

Browsers which can be identified as bots are excluded from being able to log billable impressions. However, because identification and intent cannot always be known or discerned by the publisher, advertiser or their respective agents, it is unlikely that all invalid activity can be identified and removed.

Robot instruction files

Audience Network uses robots.txt files to instruct robots that they should not follow or index any links within the domain from which the robots.txt file was retrieved. The robot instruction files are present in all tracking web server instances.

Identification of non-human activity

Audience Network uses the IAB spiders/robots blacklist to exclude non-human and invalid activities.

The IAB lists are reviewed monthly and a Facebook user agent blacklist is updated accordingly. Facebook blocks requests from null (blank) user agents and employs the IAB white-list to filter ad impressions that were not generated from a known browser.

Internal traffic

Audience Network filters impressions from Facebook internal locations.

Facebook compares IP addresses against the entire list of Facebook IP addresses, maintained by Facebook operations teams. These teams add/remove IP ranges where Facebook stores internal traffic generated when it tests its production systems. The test data is stored in a test database and is completely excluded from customer data.

Activity-based filtration

Activity-based filtration is performed via analysis of incoming events in correlation with the identified user source and window of time in which the events occurred.

If incoming events from a single user source exceed a defined threshold within a given amount of time, subsequent events will be logged, marked as non-billable and will not be reported.

Invalid impressions detection and filtration

Facebook has a number of systems in place to detect and remove general invalid traffic, such as impressions generated by bots or spiders. These systems also check for adware, malware, spam accounts, fake accounts and so on.

The filters and thresholds used to remove invalid traffic are constantly monitored, reviewed and updated where necessary.

The tools and methods to identify fake and malicious accounts are continuously monitored and evaluated by dedicated teams. Formal reviews are used to evaluate the accuracy and precision of these methods.

These methods are executed at both impression level and user level. This means that a given impression may be marked as non-billable, or a given user may be removed from the network if deemed malicious.

Data consistency and accuracy filtration

In addition to non-human and activity-based filtration, Facebook performs various checks to ensure the accuracy and consistency of data, such as:

• Time check: Impressions that originated outside of a certain time frame are excluded from further processing.
• Activity frequency capping: Impression requests that exceed a certain number per hour are marked as non-billable.

Data integrity and reporting of count discrepancies

The filters described in this document affect impression counts and help distinguish between authentic traffic (a person who is actively engaging with ads) and invalid or non-human traffic such as bots and spiders.

Data reporting

The Facebook Help Centre has a section on reporting within Ads Manager. This includes the list of preset reports, available columns for reporting and how to schedule delivery of reports. Please refer this section for more information.

Pre-release quality assurance

Audience Network and Facebook have developed tools to run end-to-end data integrity and consistency checks for quality assurance. Audience Network and Facebook also have a set of back-office tools that enable staff to monitor activity trends.

For example, the streaming process is designed to identify and log for analysis anomalies or corruption in processed data. In addition, Audience Network runs checks between raw log files and the data warehouses to detect any discrepancies between datasets.

Data re-issue/ad refund

If Audience Network detects or becomes aware of issues that impact advertiser data or spend, there is a formal investigation process to determine the cause and impact the issue.

Decisions to provide credit or refunds are made on a case-by-case basis, depending on the facts and circumstances of the issue. If credit or refund is provided, advertisers are notified through our platform. There are also circumstances in which the sales team will contact advertisers directly.

Data retention policies

Audience Network follows Facebook's impression data retention policies. These comply with the minimum requirements for IAB and MRC guidelines and standards. Customers can run and download reports against this data, although they are responsible for storing older reporting data.

* Nguồn: Facebook