Spruce Media, a Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer, examined the state of Facebook advertising in the first quarter of 2013, and reported mostly positive results, in advance of the social network’s first-quarter earnings call Wednesday afternoon.
Lisa Raphael (left), the social media producer at Katie Couric's daytime talk show Katie, is one of our featured speakers in Mediabistro's upcoming Social Media Marketing Boot Camp, an online event and workshop starting June 6, 2013. Lisa will share a case study on how the hit show uses Twitter to build interest and buzz around upcoming segments. Learn more about our our twelve event speakers and register here. 
Facebook received some lukewarm news on Wall Street courtesy of analyst Jason Helfstein of Oppenheimer & Co., who reiterated an “outperform” rating on the social network’s stock and lowered his target price to $32 per share from $33.
The redesigned News Feed Facebook announced Thursday is a beautiful, visually rich design with some borrowed elements from mobile user experience that helps create a smooth, clean experience. But you already read all about it. In an ideal world, a richer and more engaging News Feed is good news for brands, which can benefit from higher engagement on their already mostly visual posts. But there is always a “but.”
One of the first Facebook Exchange partners, AdRoll, studied 468 advertisers that ran standard Web targeting and FBX campaigns during the last six months of 2012 and found areas where each type of campaign held an advantage.
Perhaps the greatest challenge facing marketing managers right now is finding the right place online to spread their message. But since Facebook revamped its mobile and desktop offerings to include a wide range of placement options, all signs point to Facebook being an ideal platform to spend additional ad dollars. With Facebook’s recent enhancements, brands and agencies now have the ability to better engage with their audiences in new and unique ways through personalized ads that capitalize on what Ampush calls “referred intent.” This is what the social technology company characterizes as engaging relevant audiences from Facebook who are enticed by highly targeted messages or stories with social context, then perform a desired action such as liking a brand’s page or downloading a mobile application.
In an effort to help marketers better track sales, Facebook launched a new conversion measurement Tuesday, allowing advertisers to measure the return on investment of their Facebook ads by tracking user actions such as registrations and shopping cart checkouts motivated by people seeing the ads. It allows marketers to track when someone sees an ad on one platform and switches to another to make the purchase.
Facebook’s fourth-quarter earnings call is set for Jan. 30, but Facebook advertising solutions provider Spruce Media offered its early look at the state of advertising on the social network during the last three months of 2012, and the company was optimistic that the sector will continue to grow.
Have you played with the news feed position report on Facebook? In addition to the standard ad-level metrics of impressions, clicks, and spend, you can see news feed click-through rates and news feed position.
As Facebook advertisers try to find ways to get users to click on ads, new statistics show that the impression is probably more valuable than the click. TechCrunch learned more about Facebook’s view tag feature, which allows advertisers to track users who view ads, but who do not click on them. The site reports that, in one example, 87 percent of conversions came from impressions, rather than clicks.
Facebook is taking steps to provide more clarity to direct-response marketers on the effectiveness of their ad campaigns on the social network, announcing the extended beta test of a self-service conversion-measurement feature that it plans to roll out at the end of November.
