Facebook has been working to introduce more transparency in their ad metrics, with improved tools to track the actual ROI of your ad efforts, moving beyond speculative numbers and estimations. They did this with video ads last year – when advertisers complained about the accuracy of Facebook’s video metrics (a view is counted after 3 seconds, as opposed to 30 seconds on YouTube) Facebook added in new data to provide businesses with additional context as to how their video content was actually being consumed.
Facebook’s also working on new measures like Conversion Lift, which takes into account in-store sales when measuring your Facebook ad performance.
This week, The Social Network has announced two new measures to help boost the transparency of their ad products, with additional daily video consumption metrics and a new recommendation tool to help advertisers boost the performance of their Facebook ads.
Here’s how they work.
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Video Data
In a new post on Facebook’s Media Blog, Facebook Product Manager Anaid Gomez-Ortigoza has outlined their new daily video breakdowns and how they can help Facebook marketers better understand their video efforts.
From the post:
“We’ve heard from publishers that they’d like a simple way to see how their videos are performing on a particular day. Starting today, Page owners can access day-by-day breakdowns for the following metrics:
- Minutes Viewed: The total minutes of watch time spent on the video on a particular day.
- Views: The number of times your video was viewed on a particular day.
- 10-second views: The number of times the video was viewed to 10 seconds on a particular day. If the video is shorter than 10 seconds, this metric refers to the number of times people viewed at least 97 percent of the video.”
As you can see from the video, the new metrics break down Facebook video consumption in more detail, giving publishers more insights to work with in order to better enhance their on-platform efforts.
The new charts display minutes viewed by date, and can be broken down into organic and paid results.
There’s also an average completion chart, with a slider enabling you to locate the specific point/s in your video where your audience is dropping out, which, again, improves audience understanding with a view to refining your video offerings.
The new metrics are available through Page Insights and your Video Library – click on the video you’d like to see metrics for and the data will be available in the pop-up card.
Delivery Insights
Facebook’s also added in a new tool called ‘Delivery Insights’ to help advertisers better refine their Facebook ads and boost performance. The new option was noted in a lengthy post which examines how the Facebook ad auction works – well worth a read for those trying to get a better understanding of the ad process and how they might be able to improve their ads by aligning with the delivery system.
The new Delivery Insights tool was announced near the end of the post – almost a throw-away detail that could’ve easily been overlooked.
“Under-delivery is a sign that an ad could be tweaked to be more effective at winning more auctions. To take some of the guesswork out of creating competitive ads, today we’re also introducing Delivery Insights, a new set of insights available in Ads Manager that tells advertisers how their ads are competing at auction and provides recommendations on how to tweak the ad to make it more competitive.”
The above is a screenshot from an accompanying Facebook webinar discussing the details of the ad auction – so apologies for the lack of clarity – but you can see the new Delivery Insights option in action in the screenshot. In the ‘Delivery’ column of the Ad Set, there’s a new pop-up window, with a recommendation to ‘Change your bid to reach more people’, along with a suggested value to increase your bid to.
The recommendation system will take into account the reasons why your ads are losing out to others in the auction process and make recommendations based on the most common factors at play. Given the tool’s not yet active, it’s hard to measure exactly how effective it’ll be, but any additional insight is valuable, and the data here will provide advertisers with new information to take into account as they go about refining and planning their Facebook marketing process.
ROI or DOA
As social media marketing becomes more mainstream and is further integrated into everyday business process, the question of ROI becomes increasingly important. There are still some who view social media as a black hole, a device which might be fun and might be used by a lot of people, but its value for business is far less tangible, all because, traditionally, we’ve had trouble allocating a definitive value on ‘Likes’, ‘Hearts’ and followers. The fact that you have 10,000 followers is irrelevant if you can’t monetize that audience, the fact that you can generate 1,000 re-tweets is meaningless if it’s not contributing to the bottom line, at least from a business perspective. As such, marketers need to be working to better connect their social efforts to actual revenue results – and in that sense, any data tools or devices which help link these processes are incredibly beneficial.
Facebook has been working to improve and refine the transparency and detail they provide through their ad products to give publishers more options to better understand and contextualize their ad efforts – which is great, but the onus is still on marketers to utilize those functions and connect the available data with the objectives they’re aiming for in social, with the results they’ re looking to achieve for their brand. Each business will have different aims and goals in this regard, so it’s important to not only understand what information is available, but what that data actually means in relevant context.
As the medium evolves, proving ROI is going to become an ever more valuable skill for social marketers to master. If you can see beyond the basic numbers, and show definitive links between your social efforts and actual revenue, you’ll be on your way to greater business success.
