Facebook announced a new way to measure conversion lift, giving advertisers a way to determine additional business results driven from people reached by Facebook ads on different devices. WIth conversion lift measurement, Facebook determines additional sales caused by seeing ads, as opposed to having to rely on counting clicks and conversions.

This builds on the feature Facebook launched a little over a year ago enabling retailers using customer audiences to measure offline sales.

“The industry is lagging behind; online really started with search and clicks – cut to now where display, social make up online, too, and yet measurement hasn’t caught up – marketers still often use clicks to measure all of their online media,” a spokesperson for Facebook tells WebProNews. “But, clicks don’t correlate to in-store sales. Datalogix studies have shown that 90% of people who saw a Facebook ad and purchased in-store never clicked on an ad at all. By using lift measurement, an advertiser can determine the incremental business/sales that the ad impressions caused and accordingly, can make sound marketing decisions based on these results.”

“Starting now, Facebook advertisers around the world will be able to apply this measurement method to both online sales (using our conversion and Custom Audience pixels) and offline sales (using Custom Audiences and CRM data from advertisers),” the spokesperson adds. “The premise of a lift measurement is simple: when creating a Facebook campaign, a test group (people that see ads) and a control group (people that don’t) are established. When the campaign has ended, advertisers can determine what sales were driven by what ads and see the additional lift that occurred among the test group. This is a similar methodology that many other industries use – from medicine to direct mail marketing – to determine causation.”

Facebook says it’s encouraging the broader advertising industry to adopt lift as the standard for measurement. The company says it believes this to be the best method for proving the effectiveness of ads regardless of whether or not they run on Faebook.

The spokesperson says, “It addresses several of the measurement challenges currently facing marketers: over-reliance on the value of clicks, outdated technology and Ineffective testing methods.”

The company elaborates on these points in a blog post, and shares results from a conversion lift study from Open Colleges.

Image via Facebook