Social media Nazis, Facebook, recently announced the intention to deliver tools that enable digital marketers to “optimize their cross-device strategies.”
In a post titled “Expanding Measurement to More Advertisers” on the company’s ‘facebook business’ blog, the social media giant hopes to help online businesses analyse audience engagement across multiple devices.
For now, Facebook are offering the service as a freebie as part of their Business Manager campaign tool set. The platform will enable digital marketers to compare the performance of ads on Facebook against other platforms.
There is of course potential for advertising bias. Facebook will also have access to marketing metrics. Whether they will use them for the benefit of marketers or themselves remains to be seen. But when you remove the shades, you can see this how this tool can leverage paid advertising for Facebook.
For now at least, the USP is that marketers can “compare the effectiveness of Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network [ads] alongside other publishers.”
Perhaps the execs at Facebook are quietly confident their platform will outstrip the competition. However, I did notice the blog post didn’t mention what the “other publishers” were. From a personal pov, Facebook won’t beat the traffic search engines drive to my website for example.
However, I do appreciate that some companies drive more traffic through social engagement than search. It depends what type of business you are and how long you have been running.
More clarity for digital marketing agencies?
Regardless of the other platforms Facebook will go head-to-head with, the new tools in Business Manager should provide marketers with improved metrics within the social sphere.
It seems the metrics will mostly target device type, thus providing insights as to which ads work best on smaller sized screen. Metrics will include viewability and the length of engagement.
Furthermore, the metrics are expected to provide details of actual conversions. This will give marketer’s real insights to which ads are working and which are sinking down the plug hole.
In an era of ‘know thy audience,’ there is the potential to pull critical data which will impact marketing campaigns moving forward. Understanding what your customers want is half a biscuit dipped in the advertising cuppa.
This level of clarity prevents marketers from second guessing consumer behaviour. As a result, you can expect to save wasted spend on your marketing budget.
Facebook has taken plenty of criticism from social media marketers with regards viewability metrics. This is the company’s answer: ‘Okay, we will prove we are better than the competition.’ Of course, it could blow up in their face if they pitch themselves against serious competition. But will they?
