Facebook just launched a new tool to help telecommunications companies (like mobile carriers and operators) measure success on their platform. It's been tough to track the correlation between ad impressions and mobile phone sales, as the transaction typically occurs in a store, rather than online. This, of course, is not unique to telecommunications brands, so Facebook may be rolling out similar metrics for other kinds of companies in the future. In their announcement, Facebook explains why they've created this new metric:

Though clicks can be an effective indicator of interaction with Facebook content, they are less useful for linking digital impressions to in-store sales. In fact, our measurement team found that in telecommunications campaigns, more than 90% of people who made a purchase after viewing an ad on Facebook had never clicked on that ad.

The new metric, called "Telco Outcome Measurement," relies on Facebook's mobile reach to correlate ad exposure to actual sales, and to provide more valuable insight into ROI for Facebook ads. It's an interesting metric and one that, if successful, could be applied or modified to provide better information to several other kinds of businesses – not just telecommunications.