When potential dates, employers and friends glance at your online social profiles, what do they see? EyeTrackShop, a startup that runs eye-tracking studies for advertisers, helpedMashable find out by applying its technology to the profile pages of popular social networks.
The study used the webcams of 30 participants to record their eye movements as they were shown profile pages fromFacebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Klout, Reddit, Digg, Tumblr, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Pinterest at 10-second intervals. What participants looked at on each page and in what order is recorded in the images below.
More: http://mashable.com/2011/11/30/social-profile-eye-tracking/
Filed under: #mktgcloud, Analytics, Datarati, Social Media | Tags: Data, Facebook, Insights
On the eve of Advertising Week, Facebook last night announced that it will provide several new Page Insights metrics to marketers to help them gauge their reach on the social network. Along with total friends of fans and total weekly reach, “People Talking About This” will show the total number of stories published by Facebook users that mention a brand, including wall posts, comments, shares, and more. We’ve learned the new metrics will roll out on Wednesday.
The metrics will help brands measure their earned media on Facebook in addition to their paid ads and owned Page posts. While the Insights tab will only be visible to admins, a simple count of People Talking About This will be publicly available on a brand’s Page beneath their total Like count. This will give businesses some ability to benchmark themselves against competitors. Users can expect more purposefully viral marketing and ad campaigns on Facebook now that brands can accurately track their reach.
More: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/10/03/people-talking-about-this-page-insights
Filed under: #mktgcloud, Datarati, Social Media | Tags: Facebook, Social Media
By advertising to Facebook fans instead of non-fans, advertisers can reduce the acquisition cost of registrations by 44%, event signups by 33%, and purchases by 15%.
These results of a 4.1 billion ad-impression, thirteen-client test have been exclusively shared with Inside Facebook by TBG Digital, developers of one of the most popular technology solutions for buying huge volumes of Facebook ads.
More: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/06/06/target-facebook-fans-cheaper-registrations
Filed under: #mktgcloud, Datarati, Social Media, Visualisation | Tags: Facebook, Social Media
Filed under: #mktgcloud, Analytics, Datarati, Social Media | Tags: Facebook, Social Media
Some Facebook users are now seeing several changes to Facebook’s advertising analytics tool in what appears to be the start of the roll out of a major update. The changes include the addition of data on ad reach and average frequency (number of times a user has seen the same ad); a funnel showing targets, reached, and social reach; and a line graph of clicks and social actions generated by an ad.
Facebook appears to be refocusing the tool on new, social key performance indicators such as Likes and app installs, and moving away from old online advertising metrics such as CPM, which isn’t even readily shown in the updated tool.
Those to whom the update has been rolled out are offered a tour of the new features when they first visit their ads manager. It explains the new data columns in the campaigns view including:
- Reach – the number of unique individuals who viewed an ad
- Frequency – the average number of times a single person viewed an ad
- Social Reach – the absolute number of people who saw the ad with social context (names or pictures of friends who connected with the ad’s destination)
- Connections – social actions triggered by the ad, including Page Likes, application installs, and Event RSVPs
A new “Audience” funnel shows how many users were within the ad’s targeting parameters, how many saw the ad, and how many saw it with social context. This, as well as the frequency data, helps advertisers determine if an ad has exhausted its targets and either needs its creative rotated or its targeting switched to prevent the same ad from being shown too many times to the same user.
A “Response” line graph displays the clicks and connections produced by the ad campaign. This can help advertisers determine if they’re paying for clicks from the right users. A large gap between clicks and connections shows the campaign isn’t performing well, even if clicks or click through rates are high.
Some data fields that appear to have been removed from the tool include cost per thousand impressions (CPM), and daily CTR.
The update answer several requests from advertisers, including the ability to see ad frequency. Highlighting social actions triggered by ads will show the strength of Facebook’s social ad units includingSponsored Stories. By moving away from data common in search and display advertising tools, Facebook is improving the social advertising analytics experience while driving home that fact that this is a radically different advertising platform than what’s available anywhere else on the internet.
More: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/05/05/ad-analytics-audience-funnels-reach/
Filed under: #mktgcloud, Datarati, Social Media | Tags: Facebook, Social Media
Facebook Ads API service provider TBG Digital has revealed that in a 10-day, 3-client, 2 billion impression test, Facebook’s new Sponsored Stories ad units received a 46% higher click through rate, a 20% lower cost per click, and an 18% lower cost per fan than Facebook’s standard ad units.
The new ad unit has looked especially promising because it so tightly fits in with how people use Facebook. It converts a user’s activity, such as Liking a Page or a using an application, into a sidebar ad shown to their friends. Those friends can then respond to the ad unit, through taking actions such as Liking the Page or playing a game.
With evidence like what TBG is providing, advertisers should strongly consider adding Sponsored Stories to their ad mix, and Ads API tools and services should move quickly to include the ad type in their offering.
TBG Digital carries out the purchase of up to 2 billion Facebook ad impressions a day via its Ads API service for big name clients including JetBlue, American Express, and Vodafone, making it one of the largest ad buyers on the platform. When Sponsored Stories launched in January, it moved quickly to be able to provide purchases of the ad unit at scale to its clients, and has integrated thethree new Sponsored Stories types released last week into its offering. While Facebook reported that its own tests showed increased brand lift, engagement, and ad recall, there wasn’t conclusive evidence of how much better Sponsored Stories performed than standard ad units until now.
The three clients involved in the test were a retailer, a consumer packaged good brand, and a game developer, ensuring a breadth Sponsored Stories types and destinations were included. TBG Digital’s CEO Simon Mansell told us the company took care to keep the Sponsored Stories and standard ad groups as similar in targeting as possible preserve the integrity of the test. These facts combine with the high impression volume of the test to make the conclusions reliable.
Ads API-based media buyers such as TBG Digital test thousands of ad creative and targeting variants per campaign to attain the highest click through rate possible. The creative and targeting of Sponsored Stories are generated automatically, meaning Sponsored Stories not only represent a massive increase in click through rate, but a reduction in labor on the media buyer’s side.
Now that many brands have established their Facebook presence, they are concentrating on gaining fans. It now appears that the several Sponsored Stories ad types designed to drive traffic to Pages (Page Like stories, Page Post stories, Page Post Like stories) can reduce the acquisition cost per fan by 18%. This is a significant cost reduction considering many brands are looking to secure millions of additional fans.
Since Sponsored Stories don’t depend on media buyers discovering lucrative niche demographics with high click through rates that Facebook charges more for, Sponsored Stories campaigns have a 20% lower CPC according to the test. This could translate into big savings for brands, performance advertisers, and especially game developers who look to bring in millions of new players with ad campaigns supporting the launches of new games.
The data from this test support the assumptions some in the advertising industry have made about the shift towards social ad design. Sponsored Stories ad units take advantage of Facebook’s inherent strength — the social graph — to offer ad design unavailable in traditional search and display. Mansell tells us that currently about 10% of the impressions it buys are through Sponsored Stories, but that he expects that to increase to 25% as more of TBG Digital’s clients are signing on to use Sponsored Stories every day.
Since standard ad units are necessary to seed the initial actions that trigger Sponsored Stories, advertisers will always need to buy ads that don’t depend on user behavior. But data indicating that Sponsored Stories can deliver more clicks and more fans for cheaper, expect usage of Facebook’s social ad units to drastically increase this year, and more ad spend to shift from display to the social network.
More: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/05/03/sponsored-stories-ctr-cost-per-fa
LikeAudience is a new marketing research tool created by the Cambridge University Psychometrics Centre that provides psycho-demographic profiles of Facebook Page audiences. Users can see stats about the age, gender, location, friend count, personality, and the other Pages Liked by the fans of a specific Page, or find Pages with audiences that match a specified set of attributes.
Though the sample size is currently low, LikeAudience could help marketers understand the fan bases of their own or a competing Pages, or to determine targeting parameters for Facebook ads.
LikeAudience is adding the information of 100 thousand new profiles a month to its initial 50 thousand profile base, partly in thanks to a partnership with Facebook personality quiz apps myIQ and myPersonality. The data is used anonymously to protect privacy.
Visitors to the site can search for a specific Pag the psycho-demographic profile of its audience, as shown for the Barack Obama Page above. Alternatively, they can move sliders for a variety of personality and profile traits such as openness, extraversion, relationship status, or age and see Pages that who audience’s fit the attribute set. For instance, a search for Pages with audiences of liberal older men returns the liberal, crude, 1970′s author Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, whereas conservative, younger women returns reality TV show Laguna Beach.
LikeAudience also provides a set of “extreme Likes” or Pages Liked by people on the two ends of an attribute’s spectrum. This provides an enjoyable way to learn about what types of preferences are linked to what aspects of a person’s profile. Users can publish Page audience profiles to Facebook, creating an easy viral distribution channel for content that seems natural to share and discuss with friends.
While fun just to browse, LikeAudience has great potential as a serious marketing tool, as it provides data absent from Facebook’s analytics tool Insights. Page admins can analyze their own Page to discover what kind of content would make compelling Page updates. If an admin learned a high percentage of its audience is in a relationship, or is extroverted, it might suggest fun group activities or gift ideas.
Advertisers looking for targeting parameters that will drive high quality clicks can also use LikeAudience. The Similar Likes data can be used to find Pages to enter as targets in the Likes & Interests section of their Facebook ads. Learning that the Page being advertised to has a concentration of users in certain city, or have a high IQ could lead the advertiser to target certain locations or education levels.
LikeAudience does show some random community Pages with few Likes, adding noise to the search, extreme Likes, and similar Likes features. However, as more data is added to the system, the site should be able to refine its algorithm to return larger Pages. LikeAudience could become an important complement to social media monitoring for brands looking to understand their fan bases.
More: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/03/31/likeaudience-page-demograph-traits
