Facebook wants to show the world that its ads really work.
Today, the social networking giant unveiled a new online tool that will allow advertisers across the globe to test the effectiveness of the ads they post to Facebook. The tool offers what Facebook calls “conversion lift” testing, and in essence, it’s a means of tracking the behavior of Facebook users—both online and off—after they’re exposed to particular ads. Facebook provides the data needed to track behavior online, while advertisers provide the in-store data needed to identify offline purchases.
Facebook has long offered similar ways of tracking ad campaigns, and in an ad hoc way, it has even allowed advertisers to run conversion lift tests. But according to Brad Smallwood, who oversees marketing science at Facebook, the new service provides a standard online means of doing so. In other words, advertisers don’t have to phone an ad rep at Facebook to set things up. They can just open web browser.
“We’re trying to move the industry to think about honest measures—true assessments of ad impact,” Smallwood says.
Basically, before an ad campaign launches, advertisers can create two test groups: a control group of Facebook users who won’t see the ads, and a second group of users who will. Then, after the campaign runs, advertisers can compare the behavior of the two groups.
The new service move is just one way that the giants of the net—and a wide range of other companies—are working to show that modern technology can not only deliver ads in more pointed ways, but actually prove that people are responding to ads. Google, Twitter, and Adobe are the other big names here. But for Forrester analyst Richard Joyce, who closely follows the online advertising market, Facebook is uniquely positioned to track the success of ads, because it collects so much personal data about its users.
“This can be very powerful,” Joyce says. “It’s hard to create this kind of 360-degree view of the user without the kind of data that Facebook has.”
Such talk often rings alarms bells among those concerned about maintaining online privacy. But Smallwood is quick to point out that in sharing data with advertisers, Facebook anonymizes all information using what’s called a hashing system. Adi Kamdar, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the company could go further, giving people the option of turning off all tracking. But such is unlikely.
As Facebook points out, few in the industry are willing to go this far. The internet is paid for with ads, and ads are driven by data.
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