Facebook announced a way to track ad performance on Tuesday that the company says is more accurate than the standard “click-through rate.”<\/p>\n
Advertisers have traditionally tracked the success of an online ad campaign based on whether users click; generally, the more clicks an ad gets, the more successful it’s deemed.<\/p>\n
But\u00a0Facebook has argued for years that the click-through rate doesn’t tell the whole picture.<\/p>\n
In fall 2012, Facebook’s VP of Measurement and Insights Brad Smallwood made the case at a conference in New York, pointing to a Nielsen study at the time showing a mere 0.07% correlation between high click-through rates and actual sales.<\/p>\n
So the social network is trying to close the gap on its own.<\/p>\n
Facebook tracks “conversion lift,”<\/span> the sales boost generated by users who see an ad in their News Feeds and\/or click. To do that, advertisers sign up for a\u00a0free research\u00a0study conducted by Facebook.<\/p>\n In each study, the social network creates two groups of Facebook users: a test group and a control group.<\/p>\n Put simply, Facebook displays a particular ad from the advertiser’s campaign in the test group’s News Feeds, while the control group doesn’t see that particular ad in their News Feeds.<\/p>\n Facebook monitors whether members of the test group buy products from the advertiser afterwards \u2014 either online or in-store \u2014 and compares those sales with those of the control group’s.<\/p>\n The difference is essentially what Facebook is calling a conversion lift. The social network argues this method is more accurate than click-through rates.<\/p>\n When Graze, a company that sells healthy snack boxes, had Facebook conduct a lift study, the results suggested that Graze’s older\u00a0click-based performance system only tracked 72% of all snack box subscription sales.<\/p>\n Likewise, a study for Land of Nod indicated the children’s furniture business would see an online sales lift of 12% if the brand advertised a particular campaign on Facebook.<\/p>\n To be clear, while Facebook is measuring whether some users\u00a0glimpse an ad, it isn’t using “eye tracking,” a technology so granular it can tell exactly where people are looking.<\/p>\n Google, for instance, used eye tracking in 2012 to test out how Google Search should look on tablets.<\/p>\n Even if Facebook’s way of tracking ad performance isn’t as high-tech, the benefits for the social network are clear.<\/p>\n If businesses\u00a0can glean a better idea of how Facebook ads boosts their sales, the business is more likely to buy virtual ad space. <\/span>That’s vital for Facebook, which derives the vast majority of revenues from ads.<\/p>\n And while ad revenues climbed 64% year-over-year in the most recent quarter to $2.96 billion, Facebook’s new tool may help fuel its bottom line even further.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Source:\u00a0mashable.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Facebook announced a way to track ad performance on Tuesday that the company says is more accurate than the standard “click-through rate.” Advertisers have traditionally tracked the success of an online ad campaign based on whether users click; generally, the more clicks an ad gets, the more successful it’s deemed. But\u00a0Facebook has argued for years […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-86393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-dr-akwasi-osei"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=86393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}