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Facebook to do more to show brands which ads drive sales

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By Seb Joseph, News editor

January 28, 2015 | 3 min read

Facebook is to offer brands a new way to measure conversion, pushing sales not clicks as the best measure of campaign effectiveness on its platform.

The shift addresses a nagging issue among advertisers around how to move beyond last-click attribution. Now brands can evaluate which parts of their budgets on the social network are impacting sales in-store and online, potentially resolving the dilemma of return-on-investment from marketing on Facebook that has left some brands underwhelmed by the channel.

It is done through a tool, dubbed “Lift”, that indicates the rate of conversion based on consumers simply seeing an ad.

Advertisers share campaign data with Facebook, which then compares the number of people that saw the ad with those that have not before relaying the information back. The social network hopes the metric becomes the standard measurement for campaigns on the channel as it accelerates efforts to encourage advertisers to pay for ads rather than relying on organic, untargeted content. It builds on a feature, launched last year, that lets retailers use custom audiences to measure offline sales.

Facebook, along with Google, is attempting to convince advertisers to be less reliant on clicks and impressions with tools capable of measuring real-world objectives such as sales.

Many of the most commonly used measurement systems overemphasize the value of the last click, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said during its third quarter earnings call last year, which flies in the face of recent studies of its campaigns that found over 90 per cent of ad-driven in-store sales came from people who saw an ad but didn’t click on it.

The disparity around measurement has been compounded by the explosion of mobile on the platform. Facebook’s mobile offering is in rude health at a time when Google and Twitter have struggled to increase the value of their own formats.

However, the social media business has acknowledged problems in linking mobile ads to desktop transactions as an area it needs to address as it looks to expand its online inventory beyond its own core social media network.

The camaign metric has been available to some partners and third-party tie-ups for some time and moving forward will be made more widely accessible. Its expansion hints at a possible Atlas integration at some point in the future. On the same earnings call Zuckerberg added that Atlas is also able to provide accurate measurement by connecting online marketing to in-store sales.

Facebook accrued a 7.75 per cent of all global digital ad revenues last year, a 5.75 per cent jump on 2013, according to eMarketer. It generated $45.53bn in advertising revenues last year, still short of Google’s $45.53bn but it is growing at a faster rate.

Social Media Facebook Mobile Advertising

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