London: Social networking giant Facebook is battling doubts by advertisers, who have questioned the effectiveness of the firm’s advertising on the world`s largest social media platform.
The firm is preparing to unveil a huge amount of data to counter its critics, and show that "clicks", the current measure of choice, tell only half the story.
According to a new study that Facebook has conducted through a partnership with Datalogix, a data mining firm that tracks real-world retail sales, it emerged that fewer than one percent of in-store sales tied to brand advertising campaigns on Facebook come from people who clicked on an ad, The Telegraph reports.
Facebook will also argue that big-brand marketers should abandon the industry`s obsession with numbers of clicks and focus on more effective advertising techniques.
"We ended up in this world where the click is king," said Brad Smallwood, Facebook`s head of measurement and insights, who will present some of Facebook`s findings at one of the advertising industry`s biggest conferences in New York.
Smallwood said that while designing online ads to garner clicks makes sense for certain types of companies, such as e-commerce firms trying to ring up immediate online sales, clicks are not relevant to brand marketers.
According to the paper, through its partnership with Datalogix, Facebook says it can now give brand marketers data on the actual in-store sales that their ad campaigns on Facebook have generated, a more useful piece of feedback than total clicks.
Datalogix tracks the relationship between ads on Facebook and real-world spending by compiling consumer purchasing information from retail stores and matching it with data about Facebook ad impressions.
Facebook`s push to provide marketers with more feedback comes as the company`s revenue growth slows and the effectiveness of its ads remains a hotly debated topic.
Facebook, whose stock by the end of the third quarter was down 43 percent since its IPO, has unveiled a variety of new advertising capabilities in recent months, including ads designed to be viewed on smartphones, the paper added.
ANI
