Facebook enlists big-name partners to measure effectiveness of ads

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Dive Brief:

• Facebook has several new products and integrations with measurement partners like Nielsen Catalina Solutions, Oracle Data Cloud and Neustar MarketShare that are focused on helping marketers better understand the effectiveness of their ads, the social network said in a blog post. 
• The social media company said that Oracle Data Cloud will be the first to integrate Facebook’s new Lift API, making lift measurement — a measurement standard for measuring sales lift — available to more marketers. 
• Facebook announced several other new features for marketers, including a tool to provide CPG advertisers with the ability to track impacts on offline sales; new integrations to share campaign data for marketing mix modeling; the first multi-touch attribution capabilities integrated with Atlas; and the ability for mobile app advertisers to partially attribute downloads to ads that were viewed but not clicked on, so long as viewers eventually downloaded the app. 

Dive Insight:

As the marketing landscape grows more complex, accurate and meaningful measurement is more elusive than ever,with social presenting its own unique set of challenges. 

Measurement may not be the most exciting marketing-related topic, but the recent Facebook news shows the social network recognizes just how critical it is for a vibrant ad marketplace. In particular, if Facebook wants big brands to keep buying ads, it needs to help them untangle some of the mess created by a fragmenting landscape. Facebook is also trying stay ahead as other social platforms like Twitter enhance their own measurement capabilities. 

The Oracle Data Cloud announcement points to how Facebook is supporting new measurement standards, something that is important as existing measurement standards are increasingly viewed as not being up to the task for measuring today’s cross-channel marketing strategies. The goal is to give retailers and CPG marketers a way to accurately measure how likely people are to buy a product if they have seen an ad.

CPG marketers are, on average, big advertising spenders and active on Facebook. To ensure they keep coming back, Facebook is working with Nielsen Catalina Solutions, which has one of the biggest in-store transactional databases around, to understand the sales impact of Facebook and Instagram ads on offline purchases. 

By building new integrations with Nielsen, Neustar MarketShare, Analytics Partners and Marketing Evolution, Facebook is also signaling that it wants to be included when big brands leverage marketing mix modeling, which aggregates consumer data across different publishers and channels to determine which ads are driving results. Such insight has become increasingly challenging as more consumers leverage mobile.

Recognizing that app install ads are popular with marketers, Facebook also wants to help attribute app downloads beyond the last click. Facebook’s research shows that advertisers are not able to assign credit for 14% of app downloads because only the last click before a download is measureable.

Measuring consumer sentiment and actions is the common denominator across the series of developments, an approach Facebook believes provides a better understanding of performance when ads are delivered across different devices, channels and platforms.

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