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.
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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.
In the past six to 10 weeks, we’ve found choosing optimized CPM (cost per thousand impressions) to be magical in our Facebook ads. It improves click-through rate, decreases cost per click, increases fan conversion rates, generates a lower cost per action, and removes stubborn ring around the collar (just kidding on that last one). It shows that Facebook is trying to make success in Facebook advertising possible for the common person, as opposed to a freak result of random ad combinations submitted on a full moon.
Facebook is like that bar all of your friends frequent on Friday nights. You don’t really like the place: It’s noisy, random people strike up conversations, drinks are too expensive, and mundane activity seems to always become a photo opp. It’s hard not to leave the bar without feeling a general sense of dissatisfaction, but you keep returning because it’s where all your friends are hanging out.
You might have noticed, when searching on Facebook for a brand page, that other related companies show up in the search results. Facebook last month rolled out sponsored results as a new way for advertisers to get more bang for their buck, and so far, it’s working pretty well.
Keeping with the theme of the Olympic Games, Kenshoo Social wanted to see which countries offered the most value and effectiveness to Facebook advertisers in areas such as average cost per click and average frequency of delivery for ads. While the U.S. may have brought home the most gold in London, the same was not true in Kenshoo Social’s competition.
