Four tips for adapting your measurement strategy for COVID-19 impact

We've seen and heard how much the coronavirus pandemic is affecting how businesses serve their communities around the world. As business owners make changes to the services that they offer, we know many of you have to reconsider things such as what to do about marketing and how much to spend on ads.

Although it's important to focus on what's happening day to day, it's also important for businesses to think through their strategies with both the short and long term in mind. For example, although many current consumer behaviours depart from the norm, such as spending more time on social media due to concerns around COVID-19, behavioural shifts may not extend past the current environment.

It's not always easy to understand the affect that different decisions might have, so we've developed resources to help. Below, we've identified four strategies for understanding advertising performance during this time, and our guide, Adapting your ad measurement strategy for COVID-19 impact, goes over each strategy in more detail.

Evaluating your measurement strategy to adapt to today's conditions doesn't mean that you need to abandon your existing measurement approaches. Rather than changing course completely, consider simplifying your strategy to focus on using your organisation's current key sources of truth. This allows you to understand shifts and make media optimisations more quickly.

To gain a better understanding of today's behaviours, consider running quick A/B and multi-cell tests. Through measurement and learning, you can assess the impact of making adjustments in areas such as audience targeting and creative presentation. This allows you to adapt your ads, undertake changes with greater confidence and optimise your strategy for the current environment.

With the profound changes that are happening to people's day-to-day lives, media performance is often unusual. When looking at insights from tests conducted during this time, consider the extent to which current conditions are affecting results. Some findings and best practices may still be generalised and used to inform future business decisions, while others may only be applicable now.

Different verticals and products are facing starkly different realities during this time, with some seeing increased demand and others seeing dramatic drops. Moreover, advertising conditions vary widely by geography and customer base. This means that there's no one-size-fits-all approach. Ultimately, the right measurement strategy will have to be tailored to your specific goals, customers and marketing conditions.

Take a look at our guide, Adapting your ad measurement strategy for COVID-19 impact to learn more about each of these strategies and access a decision tree that can help you assess the effects of different measurement decisions. Learn more about what this means for marketers on Facebook IQ.

We'll keep sharing strategies, tips, announcements and more on the Facebook for business news site in the coming weeks. We'll also continue to explore how we can support businesses during this challenging time. Learn about our Small Business Grants programme and access our Business Resource Hub to see additional opportunities that we're offering and steps we're recommending. Get the latest updates on how Facebook is responding to the coronavirus outbreak.