14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has a lot of work to do convincing customers that it's ads and its form of advertising are effective. So far, it hasn't been so successful in doing so, while most companies are convinced that Facebook has value for their brands, they're less convinced they need to pay Facebook for it.
But the site is gearing up to convince them to look beyond the clicks, which are abysmal at Facebook, at the brand value and other ways of quantifying the success of a Facebook campaign.
Facebook advertising is always going to be more about brand image and, as such, click rates are going to be lower and less important.
"We recently partnered with a company called Datalogix to offer marketers a way to measure how their ads on Facebook drive sales for their products in stores," Facebook announced.
"This allows marketers to better understand the value of the investments they are making in Facebook and helps us provide advertising that is more interesting to our users," it said.
Having data on how actual sales are affected by Facebook advertising is a lot more important for retail or local stores than clicks on those ads.
Datalogix already collects purchasing data and this data is cross-referenced with Facebook's own info. The idea is to determine whether people who saw a specific ad on Facebook were more likely to buy a product from that brand or not.
"Importantly, we have designed this process with privacy at the forefront. We compare hashes of some Facebook data with hashes provided to us by Datalogix," Facebook explained.
"Once we compare, we are able to send corresponding data on the reach of large-scale ad campaigns, which Datalogix uses to create aggregate reports comparing product purchases by large groups of people who did or did not see an ad," it added.