Data, not promotion, the key to Facebook advertising
Facebook and Nielsen Media have agreed to a deal which will see site users polled about their attitudes to adverts placed on Facebook. It’s another sign that firms may find social media better as a source of consumer data than a means of promotion in itself.
As part of a “multi-year deal”, the two firms will launch a scheme titled Nielsen BrandLift. Eventually all advertisers on Facebook will be able to add an opt-in poll with their ads asking users what they thought of the promotion and whether it’s likely to lead them to buy a product.
Given Nielsen’s stature in the audience data industry, this seems a somewhat ineffective sampling method. By definition, an opt-in survey is likely to attract a disproportionate response from people who have an unusually strong reaction to an advert. It’s also questionable how much a response to such questioning can tell us about an ad’s effectiveness: there’s no guarantee of a link between how entertaining and memorable an ad is, and what effect it has on sales.
It’s also curious to read that:
Nielsen BrandLift measures aided awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability and purchase consideration via a set of short, specially designed one or two question surveys.
That certainly sounds like one hell of a productive question.
However, the surveys may help Facebook solve a significant problem with its ad sales. Most ads on the site are display ads, meaning that they don’t always have a clickable link to the advertiser’s own site. That makes it much more difficult to accurately track the response from advertising on Facebook in comparison with a clickable ad which appears alongside search results.
Even if the surveys don’t do much to put that right, it could be the first step towards a new type of service social networking sites could offer advertisers. One area that Facebook does excel in is knowing a lot about individual users. Cross-reference user profiles with the responses to such surveys and the site can provide advertisers with valuable information about how different demographic groups respond to particular styles of advert.
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September 22nd, 2009
So what happens if you use Adblock Plus. Does it hide the poll as good as it hides the adds?