Filed under: Data, Social Media, Web Analytics | Tags: Data, Facebook, Nielsen
Facebook Inc. plans to announce a deal with online measurement company Nielsen Co., in a step to address advertisers’ frustration with measuring how ads perform on the social network.
Under the partnership, Facebook will begin polling users about some of the display ads it runs on its site, such as banner promoting a movie release.
Facebook will provide that data, including responses from those who didn’t see an ad, to Nielsen, which will package it for advertisers.
More: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125356656635628897.html?mod=dist_smartbrief
As most sophisticated marketers know by now, performance advertising on Facebook is significantly different from search engine marketing.
While SEM is fundamentally keyword-targeted, meaning advertisers bid on keywords, Facebook Ads is fundamentally profile-targeted, meaning advertisers bid on people.
As a result, the ad copy, call to action, and graphics need to be rethought and re-designed for the “people-targeted”Facebook world – not just copied and pasted from your Google AdWords campaign.
As more advertisers and marketers shift more of their attention and budget to Facebook Ads, Facebook’s performance advertising system, it’s crucial to understand the power of Facebook’s targeting capabilities.
Here are details on the 11 ways to target Facebook Ads that every performance marketer should know: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/07/27/10-powerful-ways-to-target-facebook-ads-that-every-performance-advertiser-should-know/
Last month, Facebook suspended two Facebook Platform ad networks from operating on the Facebook Platform due to deceptive practices and bad user experience. The ad networks were allegedly presenting Facebook users with misleading advertisements inside third party applications (i.e. suggesting a user’s friends had taken an action when they hadn’t), and sometimes putting Facebook user data on outside landing pages in ways that violated Facebook’s privacy policy.
Facebook has been increasingly cracking down on Platform ad networks that make liberal use of profile pictures and data to increase conversion.
Specifically, the policy enforcement team has been contacting ad networks lately instructing them to make sure they’re in the clear on two key issues:
- Misleading ad creative. Often times, some ad networks use friends’ photos or names in ads like “Can you beat their IQ score?” that falsely imply friends have previously engaged with the app or site being promoted.
- Putting user data in landing pages. Sometimes, ad networks have put Facebook profile photos in the landing pages users reach when they click on a Platform ad. This is also somewhat misleading and can violate Facebook’s privacy policy.
In general, Facebook is trying to clean up the image of ads on the Platform to maintain user trust. Obviously, it’s very challenging to do constant quality control on every ad network operating on the Platform.
Filed under: Social Media, Web Analytics | Tags: Facebook, Omniture, SiteCatalyst, Social Media Measurement
While marketers understand it’s important to build a presence on Facebook by creating custom applications and pages to interact with customers, sometimes they (rightly) hesitate to make a substantial investment if they can’t track the success of those initiatives.
Omniture, a company whose SiteCatalyst product allows marketers to monitor the performance of their brands on websites by tracking traffic metrics such as page views, referrals, and time spent on a page, should be able to help solve that issue. Today, Omniture launched App Measurement for Facebook. The new product allows marketers to see just how users interact with their Facebook applications.
Omniture’s App Measurement tool tracks metrics like:
- Marketers will be able to understand which user demographic segments are adopting the application most vigorously.
- Marketers can segment users by number of friends they have, or by the social activity performed.
- Which users invited their friends to use an app.
- What sections of the app Facebook users spend the most of their time.
- How Facebook engagement leads to conversions.
Ideally, this product should allow marketers with no technical background to have an immediate analytics tool that shows a robust set of metrics of how their brands are doing on Facebook. There have been many analytics tools created by start-ups to monitor such activity, and developers have often built their own, but Omniture is one of the most mainstream players to get involved with Facebook analytics
Omniture executives say the new addition to its SiteCatalyst product will demystify the questions many marketers might have about their Facebook efforts.
More: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/05/28/omniture-releases-analytics-tools-for-facebook/
Facebook started testing a new “progress bar” module to new users’ profile pages to encourage them to quickly become more deeply engaged with the site. When new users join Facebook, they’ll see a partially full blue bar with a list of next steps they can take to “make it go up.”
Interestingly, however, friends can also help new users “make progress” by suggesting new friends for them or interacting with content they’ve created. In the screenshot above, for example, Kye’s friends can help him “move up” by commenting on photos he’s uploaded. This in turn accelerates the rate at which new users get introduced to some of the core value propositions that Facebook offers. LinkedIn has been doing this for years, but their progress bar is not visible to friends/connections – only yourself.
What are friends for right?
A very very smart data capture and enrichment strategy. Nice work FB!
Filed under: Data, Social Media, Visualisation | Tags: Data Visualisation, Facebook, Project Palantir
The goal of Facebook’s Project Palantir is to “visualise all the data that Facebook gets”. Each Facebook action is geo-located on a 3D globe, becomes a particle that floats off the surface of the Earth, and then disappears. Facebook interactions (e.g. friend requests, pokes, wall posts) are shown by 3D splines or a trailing mesh connecting 2 locations, with each color representing a different sort of interaction.
Check out the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTQf8MqEfg0
Filed under: Mobile, Social Media, iPhone | Tags: Applications, Facebook, iPhone
Facebook tonight launched version 2.0 of its Facebook for iPhone application, bringing many features that were before only available on the site to a mobile device for the first time.
With version 2.0:
The home page now features a full News Feed, along with access to filtered views of the News Feed, like Status Updates, Posted Items, Live Feed, and Events.
- Full photo tagging and posting is now supported.
- Notifications are now accessible for the first time.
- Profiles now have tabs, like the Facebook website redesign.
- Feed comments are accessible both here and on the News Feed.
Overall, Facebook for iPhone now looks and feels like a fully featured Facebook – it’s a remarkably well designed product
Facebook’s Joe Hewitt, the lead developer of the iPhone application, said shortly after the release tonight, “I’ve been hearing some bug reports in 2.0, so I will probably wind up doing a 2.1 release in the short term to address many of these problems. Please tell me if you find anything wrong (in the comments here, or you can message me), and I will try to fix it.”
Facebook for iPhone can be downloaded by heading to the App Store on your iPhone.
Filed under: Analytics, Data, Social Media | Tags: Facebook, Lexicon, Sentiment Analysis
Facebook has just launched a limted test of a new version of Lexicon, the tool for researching what users are saying on each other’s walls on Facebook. The previous version only showed relative volume of terms over time, but the new version has several key enhancements:
- Actual numbers, instead of just relative volume. Now, you can see how many wall posts are actually being written containing the given term.
- Demographic breakdowns, by gender and age
- Geographic breakdowns, by US state, Canadian province, or UK country (no data is available outside of these 3 countries yet). You can also do comparisons between two terms on the same map.
- Sentiment over time. Facebook has not said exactly how it determines this measure. You can also compare sentiment between two terms.
- Associations. You can see terms frequently mentioned alongside a given term.
Currently, the new version is limited to a fixed list of about 20 terms. Facebook should open it up for general use soon.
Filed under: Social Media | Tags: Application, Facebook, Social Networking
Don’t like the new facebook? Here is the how to get your old version back: Just add the Facebook Developer application here and then click on over to facebook via this link.
Will Scully-Power
Data Director
Mark.
