FacebookHardly a day goes by without Facebook tweaking or altering its products and services in some fashion.

The latest move? Facebook late last week said, in an en email to SocialTimes, that it wanted to provide a “cleaner metric” for its monthly active users.

So, starting with its third quarter earnings the social network will no longer count what it called “third-party” pings, or people who did not access Facebook itself, but shared content or activity via Facebook Login-integrated websites or applications.

With a hat tip to SocialTimes, Facebook’s revised definition for monthly active user, included in the company’s 10-Q filing, is as follows:

“We define a monthly active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or used our Messenger app (and is also a registered Facebook user), in the last 30 days as of the date of measurement.”

The social network reported 1.5 billion monthly activer users at the end of the third quarter, up from 1.49 billion in the previous quarter and 1.35 billion in the same period in 2014.

Facebook’s alteration should make it easier for PR pros and marketers to show upper management a more legitimate picture of who is accessing the company’s content and/or programming.

But the change doesn’t address what remains one of the major sticking points for social media investment: the value of “likes” and “followers,” which both have been dismissed as so-called vanity metrics.