A new product to measure ad effectiveness

Sep 22, 2009 07:38 GMT  ·  By

Facebook's growth has been massive and the social network is now one of the top Internet giants. But, while it now measures 300 million users, its revenue is far smaller than its user base would indicate. There are some legitimate reasons for that – the company has been taking a more cautious approach to advertising, but there is also a lack of trust from big name advertisers, which is what the company intends to change through a new partnership with audience measurement company Nielsen.

The two have confirmed they have signed a partnership agreement spanning several years and the social network is expected to unveil a brand-new advertising product later today during Advertising Week in New York. Called Brand Lift, it will be the first product to become available thanks to the new partnership. The first test partners will be able to start using it as early as this week but it will eventually be rolled out for all advertisers who are Nielsen customers in the coming months.

With Brand Lift, Facebook will use opt-in polls to measure the impact advertising has on its users. The polls will target two sets of users, one that has seen advertising for a product from the company contracting the poll and another one that hasn't been exposed to the ads. The poll will test the advertising campaign's effectiveness by measuring "aided awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability, and purchase consideration."

There could potentially be a great number of concurrent tests and the product is expected to be eventually introduced to other websites as well, thought there was no mention of Facebook Connect. There is a real need for this measurement product as advertisers, especially big companies with large campaigns spanning across several mediums, have no real way of knowing if social network ads really work or how well. Without a reliable way to measure their return on investment, most are reluctant to spend significant amounts of money online, especially on social networking sites, but Facebook hopes Brand Lift will prove the value of an ad campaign on its site.