Facebook boosts its social marketing reporting tools


10 Sep 2010

Facebook has introduced new social metrics to help marketers comprehend the benefits of adverts which include social context from people’s friends on Facebook.

The site now includes a new column called “Social %” in the Ads Manager.

This shows the percentage of ad impressions that were delivered with social endorsements.

Social endorsements relate to the part of the ad that shows people which of their friends have liked or engaged with the Facebook page, event or application.

Marketing on Facebook relies on word-of-mouth on a large scale, making ads more relevant and have a greater impact on people who see them.

Ads promoting pages, events or applications are eligible to be delivered with advocacy information or social endorsements.

Other new columns will also appear within the ‘Advertising Performance Report,’ available through the Reports tab of the Ad Manager.

These include social impressions; for ad impressions that include social endorsements, social clicks; for clicks on ads that came from an ad with social endorsements and social CTR; social clicks divided by social impressions.

Reporting on these new metrics will give marketers a greater understanding that the impact of social context has on advertising on Facebook.

It will allow them to further optimise future campaigns to maximise the number of ads people see with social context from their real friends.

Recent research from Nielsen shows that people are 68pc more likely to remember the ad and twice as likely to remember what the ad said when they notice that a friend has interacted with the ad on Facebook.

Facebook does not share names or other personal information with advertisers.

People can see the names of their friends without Facebook sharing that information with the advertiser.