• #1042 (no title)
  • About Leoni Designory – www.leonidesignory.com
  • Infographics
  • Social Media – A Overview

leonidesignoryblog

~ socially savvy design

Tag Archives: Analytics

Facebook Expands Custom Audiences With Third Party Audience Segmentation Data

28 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Facebook

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Analytics, Facebook, SEO, Social Media Marketing

Last year, Facebook introduced Custom Audiences, which enables companies to upload customer or prospect databases and target those individuals on Facebook by matching customer IDs with Facebook IDs, phone numbers or email addresses (subject to privacy protections).

That capability was recently expanded with “Lookalike Audiences,” which enable marketers to find segments that generally match specific Custom Audiences on Facebook.

Today, Facebook further extended the functionality of Custom Audiences by announcing that information from third-party data vendors Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom and BlueKai will become incorporated into targeting and segmentation capabilities into Facebook.

This development was first discussed by AdAge last week.

What this means is that selected advertisers (“managed advertisers,” for now) will be able to target market segments offered by Acxiom and the other mentioned providers. This dramatically enhances Facebook’s own targeting capabilities. It also brings targeting capabilities that exist for direct mail and email marketing, for example, into Facebook.

If a car maker or dealer is seeking people categorized as prospective car buyers (“auto intenders”), data from the vendors above can now be used to find these people on Facebook. Facebook explains:

  • Businesses that already work with these select third parties can now use the same information they have used elsewhere to create campaigns on Facebook.
  • We will work with these select third parties to create pre-defined targeting categories on Facebook. Businesses of all sizes will now be able to target categories like “soda drinkers” or “auto-intenders.”

This second bullet is perhaps more significant: there will be new pre-defined audience segments, built using third party data, that marketers will be able to tap on Facebook. They’ll also be able to layer existing Facebook targeting and tools on top of those segments as well.

Facebook offers a couple of case studies:

  • Castle Auto Group, a car dealership in Chicago, saw a 24x return on their ad spend combining Facebook offers with custom audiences to their existing target customers
  • Kingnet, a Hong Kong-based game developer, saw a more than 40% decrease in cost-per-installs of its action role-playing game by using custom audiences

I spoke to Facebook at some length about the privacy issues that are implicated. The company explained that there’s nothing new here that isn’t already happening elsewhere online and offline.

Facebook also told me that it recognizes it’s held to a higher standard (because of its history) than others. Accordingly, it has taken pains to protect privacy and allow users to opt-out of third party audience targeting. Here’s what the company said today about the expansion of Custom Audiences and privacy:

As with our existing targeting tools, the process is designed so that no personal information is exchanged between Facebook and marketers (or the third parties those marketers work with). These select third party partners use hashes of customer or potential customer information to create audience groups on Facebook. (For more on this type of targeting and hashing, see here). When advertisers reach these groups of people with ads, they’ll get back the same anonymous and aggregate ad reporting marketers on Facebook currently receive. As with other Facebook advertising, we don’t share private information about individuals with marketers as a part of this process.

At Facebook we work hard to be transparent about how our advertising works and to give you control over the ads you see. As with other Facebook ads, you can ask Facebook to hide a select ad or ads from a specific advertiser by providing feedback though the drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner of the ad. In addition, you can choose to remove yourself from these select third party partners’ targeting through the “About this ad” link or from the Help Center.

Privacy advocates will undoubtedly raise concerns and be skeptical. But Facebook seems sincere in its desire to give users ultimate control and choice over this process.

Speaking purely from a marketing perspective, these new enhancements further improve what was already a compelling set of tools and audience targeting capabilities. They will roll out more broadly in the coming months.

 

by Greg Sterling

Share this:

  • Print
  • Email
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Like this:

Like Loading...

Everything You Need to Know About the Facebook Page Insights Bug

25 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Facebook

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Advertising, Analytics, Engagement, Enterprise Social, Facebook, facebook page insights bug, Marketing, Metrics, Mobile, Mobile Apps, News, Social Media Marketing, Strategy

Last Friday Facebook announced that it had discovered bugs in Facebook Page Insights. These bugs were likely introduced around the same time that Facebook made changes to its EdgeRank algorithm, however the bugs were unrelated to the EdgeRank changes, originating with changes made to Facebook’s Android and iOS apps.

Facebook didn’t specify exactly when they became aware that Page Insights were not being properly reported, only that they began working on a solution immediately once the errors were found.I don’t have any new information for you here, however I have taken information from three sources, Facebook’s original announcement on FacebookStudio.com, TechCrunch’s article a few hours later, and the notification that all Facebook page admins will see at least twice.

I’ve stripped out all of the fluff to give you this easily digestible guide that answers your most pertinent questions and provides you with the next steps you should take to understand and minimize the fallout in your own reporting structure.

Which Facebook Metrics Were Affected?

Reach: Paid Reach, Organic Reach, and Viral Reach

Impressions: Organic, Paid, and Viral Impressions

(Note: Check out the link if you’re not familiar with the difference between Reach and Impressions.)

Engagement: Metrics that include Reach or Impressions in their calculation, such as individual post virality, will also be incorrect.

How Are Those Metrics Incorrect?

Reach and Impressions were not recorded for mobile users. Essentially, as far as Page Insights were concerned, fans who saw your posts on mobile devices didn’t exist, and were not counted.

Impressions for ads that appear in the newsfeed were counted twice. Once as organic and once as paid. This bug only affected PC/Mac/Linux users, not mobile users.

Facebook says that all ads were delivered properly, however, and thus no one was over or under-charged for ads. Facebook also reported that their ads platform has extensive monitoring and verification measures already in place to prevent something like this from happening to their Ad Insights.

Engagement metrics, Virality being one example, that are calculated by comparing one metric to Reach or Impressions will also be affected. When Reach increases and engagement does not, Virality drops. So, if your Reach was under-reported, then your post’s Virality has likely been reported as higher than it actually was.

What Changes In Metrics Should I Expect Going Forward?

Facebook reports that changes will vary from page to page, and some may not be affected at all, or at least not very significantly. You may however see an increase in Reach and Impressions, and if so, you’ll likely also see a decrease in post virality, because it’s a comparison of people who saw your post vs. people who interacted with your post.

How Long Has This Been Going On?

Facebook did not specify exactly how long their Page Insights have been incorrectly reported, but it’s safe to assume that data reported from late September up until today is not accurate. You should expect accurate data to be reported once again starting tomorrow (Monday, February 24th, 2013).

Facebook also announced that metrics affected during this period can’t be corrected for historical data, so the currently incorrect data from this time period will remain in place.

What Is Facebook Doing About it?

Facebook claims to have already placed new quality and verification measures in with their metrics data to both verify the data and actively monitor for bugs in the future.

So, What Should I do?

Don’t trust your metrics data from August of 2012 through February 24th, 2013. Reach and Engagement are essential Facebook metrics for most brands, so these bugs make the meat and potatoes of your metrics data useless for this period.

Starting February 25th, 2013 you should monitor the metrics mentioned in this post for about a month. Looking at data from February 25th through around March 27th will give you a better idea of what your actual numbers are for the affected metrics.

Comparing the correct data starting on February 25th to the measurements for the same metrics from August 2012 – February 24th, 2013 will give you some idea of just how off the reported metrics were for your page while the bugs were active. So, you can at least have an accurate ballpark figure as to what your true measurements were while these bugs were active, and know if the changes caused these metrics to be over-reported, or under-reported for your page.

Some people are speculating that these bugs coinciding with the changes in how Facebook calculates EdgeRank are too much of a coincidence. I doubt this is the case, after all, having to admit that key metrics have been miss-reported for months is far more embarrassing than having to admit that EdgeRank was altered to encourage additional ad spend from brands. In fact it could lead to less confidence in Facebook ads and Facebook as a business marketing platform.

It certainly does lead to some interesting questions about the data Facebook has shared with us though, particularly their claims that the changes to EdgeRank at the end of September did not hurt Reach for most brands, when the bugs would have certainly caused a noticeable decrease in Reach, which Facebook should have seen and attributed to something. Considering that Facebook now admits Reach most likely did decrease for many brands, just not for the reasons we all thought, their previous denial of any decrease stands at odds with their own data.

For the optimist in all of us, at least once you compare the buggy metrics to your month’s worth of correct metrics, you’ll have some great data for proving to management exactly how important mobile is for your brand’s efforts on Facebook (since the bugs essentially caused insights to pretend like mobile users didn’t exist), and what you stand to miss out on if you don’t optimize content for those users!

Share this:

  • Print
  • Email
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Like this:

Like Loading...

No-Cost Social Media Listening Tools

25 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Advertising, Analytics, Best Practices, Engagement, Enterprise Social, Facebook, facebook page insights bug, Listening, Marketing, Metrics, Mobile, Mobile Apps, Monitoring Tools, News, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Strategy

Think you can’t afford to have a good social media management system? Think again. Budget should never be a deterrent in monitoring the chatter around your brand. Listening to online buzz should be part of everyone’s day whether you are an enterprise level operation or a one-man shop.

Even though the market is saturated with low cost and high cost listening tools, you can put together a pretty good basic listening dashboard with no-cost tools. Most of all, your listening dashboard should have the power to double as a social media management system (SMMS) that allows you to do elementary functions such as post, comment, and schedule posts. This allows you to manage and monitor from the same dashboard. Here are my favorite free tools. A mix of these will work for your basic needs, depending on what you want to monitor.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is the best place to start. With the free version of HootSuite, you have the ability to manage a total of five accounts  from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Ping, WordPress, MySpace, or Google Pages. You are allowed one admin to control those accounts. But when it comes to monitoring, you have the ability to stream search terms, hashtag feeds, and Twitter lists as well. You can monitor up to ten streams per tab and have 20 tabs on your free account.   Note: there is no good search engine for Facebook. The only thing you can really do effectively is monitor the pages you manage.

HootSuite Screen shot

In the screen shot above is a Hootsuite dashboard, the tabs I have are along the orange highlighted line. One tab for all Twitter lists and other tabs for specific search terms. As you can see in the blue, there is only three managed accounts in this example of Hootsuite. The little icon highlighted in purple is the calendar function that lets you schedule posts to all your social networks. The green highlighted panel is where all the reports and settings reside.

Google Alerts

I have a number of Google Alerts set up to be delivered to my email daily. Occasionally I set some up to be delivered in real-time. This tool covers the web well, but not social media.

Social Mention

Social Mention is good for real-time searches. Depending on how strong and precise your search term is, you will get good results.  You can see from the da shboard above that there are two ways to search: on social platforms or on the web platforms on the “All” pull-down menu on top. I recommend trying it out and seeing if it works well for you.

RSS Readers

I recommend setting up a newsfeed that you can peruse on a daily basis.  I would include competitors’ blogs, sector blogs, internal blogs, news feeds, and any other online information you want to keep track of. I use Google Reader so I can track it from any other Google platform I have open. I glance at titles and read anything I feel I need to. There are a number of news aggregators out there including Netvibes, NewsGator, Feed Demon and others. Find one you like.

Finally, here are a few reasons why you should monitor your brand online:

  1. Discover early warning signs of negative or false information that can trigger a crisis, if left unattended.
  2. Identify your key critics and watchdogs; key influencers and advocates.
  3. Identify which social media channels best suit your organizational culture, and which ones your stakeholders frequent.
  4. Follow your competitors and discover what is engaging and trending in your sector.
  5. Uncover ethical blind spots your organization may have.

This is just a short list of free tools you can piece together for a good monitoring system.  Do you have a preferred monitoring system set up? Tell us how does it work for youi?

Share this:

  • Print
  • Email
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Like this:

Like Loading...

Facebook to offer conversion tracking and optimization through self-serve ad tool

04 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Facebook

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Analytics, Facebook, ROI, Social Media, Tracking

Facebook today announced that it will offer a self-service conversion measurement feature for direct response marketers and expand the capabilities of its Optimized CPM bidding option to incorporate conversion data.

Facebook tells us marketers will be able to use its tool to generate a unique bit of code to add to any page on their website where they want to measure conversions, for example, checkout pages or registration forms. When marketers choose Optimized CPM bidding, Facebook’s system will show ads to users who are most likely to convert.

Read More

Share this:

  • Print
  • Email
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Like this:

Like Loading...
Newer posts →

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • December 2015
  • October 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • November 2012
  • August 2012

Categories

  • Advanced Search
  • Best Practices
  • Bing Search Engine
  • Bloging
  • community manager
  • Content Marketing
  • Email Marketing
  • Facebook
  • Flip Key
  • Google Analytics
  • Google SEO
  • Google+
  • Hashtags
  • Hootsuite
  • Instagram
  • LInkedIn
  • Mail Chimp
  • Marketing
  • Merchandising
  • Mobil Web
  • mobile app marketing
  • Mobile Web
  • Multi Channel Marketing
  • Online Marketing
  • Pinterest
  • Political
  • PR
  • Responsive Web
  • Responsive Web Design
  • Social Listening
  • SPAM
  • Trip Advisor
  • tumblr.
  • TV Advertizing
  • Twitter
  • Uncategorized
  • Web Site Design
  • WordPress
  • Yelp
  • YouTube

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×
    Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
    To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
    <span>%d</span> bloggers like this: