What you need to know about Facebook’s Aggregated Events Measurement (AEM)

This blog has been updated since publishing to include the 7-day click change for opted-out users, which was changed by Facebook on June 30, 2021

This year has brought on significant shifts in the ad buying space. There has been so much information we (as ad buyers) have had to retain just to be able to repeat back to clients and so we can properly advertise on the platform.

To say the least, this information has come at us all at once and we continue working through it in stages. AEM is an example of this. We’re about to dive in on this little Facebook feature that has likely been overlooked or misrepresented all together.

Facebook’s Aggregated Events Measurement (AEM)

Through conversations in our dedicated Facebook group and in our membership slack channel, it has come to our attention there has been some confusion on what AEM actually is. A big part of this is because of where AEM is placed within the Facebook Events Manager dashboard.

Facebook has placed it as a tab directly next to the Pixel/Conversions API Event. As many of us know, the pixel events tab is the area where we can see ALL of the pixel event fires that have passed through a tagged site in varying windows of time. We believe that this has led many advertisers (ourselves included) to believe that AEM was also just an aggregate of all prioritized pixel events on a site from those iOS users who opted-out of app tracking via Apple’s ATT prompt.

Not so.

What AEM actually is

AEM is actually ALL prioritized events that unique opted-out users have taken as a result of your paid ads within a 7-day click, and applied within 48-72 hours of the event occurring. (Prior to June 30, 2021, AEM was based on a 1-day click only, but was updated to include opted-out actions over the longer/default time window). More on how this may change in a moment, but this does explain for the most part, the very low numbers of events that many may be seeing when reviewing AEM.

For example, in the above image, over the last 28 days, this account has seen 376 view contents, 25 add to carts and 5 purchases from opted-out users based on a 7-day-click. Now while we would like to call each of these a “unique” action, the reality is because these are calculated based on what happened in a 7-day-click, it is possible over the 28-day window, a single user did take multiple actions over several days. However, we feel this data is still relatively small and because it is based on ads only, the higher prioritized events will likely be more unique over others.

So what can we gain from this?

If advertisers are running ads on a 7-day-click/1-day-view attribution window, we know that Facebook is NOT attributing these opted-out events to our ads in Ads Manager reporting, so we can come to Events Manager’s AEM tab at the end of the month (or end of a week, just note 2-3 days for conversion events to roll in) and add the total number of AEM-attributed purchases to our overall ad performance. Of course, this still will not show hundreds of unaccounted conversions that happened from opted-out users outside of a 7-day click window, nor does it equate for the in-platform reported ROAS metric, but it IS a help in continuing to show clients that we’re on the right path, even though numbers may look different.

If you are looking to get a bit of a ROAS bump applied to your ads, you could consider multiplying the client’s AOV by the number of unattributed conversions shown and then adding that to your overall monthly performance. So for example with the client above, if they have an AOV of $100, the math might look like this:

We spent $500 in ad spend for the month and Facebook Ads Manager shows we had 10 sales and generated $1,000 for a 2x ROAS. We are now looking in AEM and see we had 5 purchases from opted-out users not counted in Ads Manager so we add them to our overall purchases and we know our AOV is $100. That now gives us 15 sales for the month directly attributed to our ads and what we can figure to be $1,500 revenue, which now brings us up to a 3x ROAS.

Don’t feel like doing this math? We created an AEM Calculator so you don’t have to.

The other thing to think of here (and hopefully brings back a bit of sanity) is that (again) this is only a partial view of attribution based on actions from opted-out users taken within a 7-day-click. There are likely many other ghost conversions that are occurring within 28 days (or more) of clicking that are not being attributed to the paid ads, even when using AEM.