Early last year, Facebook began beta testing a tool for marketers to monitor campaign success across the company’s platforms. That vision has come to fruition, as last week the company announced Facebook Attribution for all of its advertisers, a free tool that will provide reporting on campaigns across numerous channels.

Using machine learning, the data-driven attribution model will highlight how each ad is driving specific actions, like purchases or websites visits, and track engagement and conversions across multiple devices, publishers and channels.

According to Facebook:

Using the new data-driven attribution model, you can see how your ads on Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and Messenger are contributing to incremental business results compared to if you were not running ads.

Marketers can utilize the data gathered in the reports to gain a better understanding of consumer behaviors along their path-to-purchase journeys and better strategize future marketing efforts.

Within the last few years, Facebook has released several solutions aimed to help marketers understand the correlations between Facebook ads and offline actions taken by consumers, including:

• Indoor Place Tips, an indoor marketing solution that collects a business’s relevant information and places it at the top of in-store visitors’ News Feeds.
• An extension of Local Awareness Ads which adds relevant location information for businesses with 5+ locations and individual local Pages.
• “Store visits reporting” for Local Awareness Ads which highlights how many people visited a store after seeing an ad on Facebook, provides users with a means to improve ad creative and targeting based on those visits and analyzes the results for future campaigns.
• Local Insights, which highlights foot traffic around SMBs.