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Facebook: Advanced Advertising Analytics |
Facebook, as
a company, is really good at a lot of things. One of them is providing valuable
advertising opportunities to businesses, and providing targeted ads to users.
At its
inception, Facebook’s targeted advertising system was pretty straightforward.
Advertisers could select certain criteria like gender, age group, or interests,
and their ads would show up for users having those characteristics. That made
sense, and because of Facebook’s massive user base, businesses used this system
to advertise with decent results. However, in 2012, when Facebook became publicly owned and traded, this main source of
income for the company needed enhancement.
Up to this
point, advertisers were able define and track user’s self-prescribed
characteristics. They could kind of judge how their targeting was, but a huge
variable in the equation was that much of their data was simply what
users said about themselves. They could only see if someone clicked their ad to
get to their page, or clicked their ad to install their app. Up to this point,
advertising on Facebook was a soft science. Enter the 2012 Facebook Ads Manager and Offers Analytics update, Page Insights. [3]
Now,
advertisers are able to analyze their success by seeing, in detail, what users
do after they are shown an ad. Do they mention it in a comment? Install the app
from the advertisement? Spend app credit within that app? Share the company’s
page with their friends, or tag it in a comment? Now, advertisers can optimize
for all of that conversion data, and more. [2] It all comes down to getting an
ad in front of the right person. For example, before, if ten people clicked an
ad and liked a page, then the owners of that page would know that ten people
like their page and could target their ads to those ten people. However, they
don’t really know anything about those ten people, besides their interest (the “like”)
and some demographic information. But with Page Insights, that advertiser might
see “Hey, one of these users shares a ton of his “liked” pages on his wall, and
constantly tags his friends at different businesses in the area. These other
nine never do anything.” The advertiser could spend money on advertising to
that one, valuable user, instead of him plus nine others, and likely achieve
the same exposure.
When you run
a service that relies on (read: completely depends on for continued existence)
advertising, you better have a damn good system for providing it. Facebook, the
brilliant company that it is, has exactly that.
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Very interesting. It's always been spoken of behind the scenes as to how facebook will capitalize on all of the users. After reading your post, I can start to see a real business plan and process for converting these users into real dollars.
ReplyDeleteGreat information! It's interesting to see the shift that Facebook has taken and surprising that they have given the tools to track analytics to page owners.
ReplyDeleteWell it seems that by providing their page owners these analytics, they will prevent owners seeking to host their pages elsewhere because they want to track the analytics of their site.
DeleteTheir Insights Tab is very interesting. Its crazy how many metrics they have on the daily reports aside from just the basic fan count & # of likes.
ReplyDeleteWe (Rossignol brands) find it very helpful to go through our Insights so we can make sure we are publishing appropriate posts for the audiences we want to hit. It's pretty critical to make sure you have the right blend of wording, imagery, links, and other content; it can be the difference between a 10,000 visual post and a 10,000,000 visual post for us.
ReplyDelete