A new report suggests that Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) may be currently seeing a substantial rise in the usability and effectiveness of its marketing platform. Many investors and advertisers had been worried that the firm’s visual advertising was not effective in generating revenue for the companies utilizing the service.
The report, which comes from Yesmail Interactive, asserts that the firm’s marketing platform is still being fine tuned by advertisers to the needs of users. The level of engagement with advertisements is still increasing.That is a good sign for Facebook as it continues to suffer from a poor IPO.
Engagement is one of the key metrics in assessing the effective of an online marketing campaign. It is difficult to tell the marginal effect of a campaign on actual sales, this makes engagement a useful proxy. Engagement is usually considered the level of interaction, and therefore recognition between a user and a brand.
Yesmail used an algorithm to allow the direct comparison of engagement across different sized companies and campaigns. It also led to the creation of total Facebook engagement statistics which, as the graph below clearly shows, are growing at an incredibly high pace. The level of engagement is outstripping even the growth in total campaign numbers.
Yesmail’s data follows a tracking period of three months on a mix of twenty brands that advertise on Facebook. Those brands include ones with very large spending and some with a much smaller spend on total campaigns. The results, surprisingly, do not exactly correlate between engagement and number of campaigns for each brand.
There is clear trend however. Advertising on Facebook is getting better. Firms are learning to use the resources available to them on the site to interact with their customers in a deeper and more meaningful way. This is good news for those worried about the effectiveness of Facebook advertising.
The report also analyzes the effectiveness of advertising on days of the week, time of day and the type of media used to advertise. The most effective, in a general sense, is a video campaign launched on a Tuesday between 10 p.m. and 12 a.m.
On the other hand campaigns that focused on status updates and outside links were not effective. Users are becoming less willing to follow links from Facebook to outside sources. This means advertisers have to use their resources on the site rather than use Facebook as a path to their own base.
Status updates and other news feed centric advertisements are not effective means of advertising according to the report. They result in much lower levels of engagement than justifies their prevalence on the social network. Email campaigns, concurrent with social campaigns, are also seen to have a resounding effect on engagement.
Yesmail’s full report, which is available here, contains more valuable insight on Facebook advertising as well as advertising on other popular social networks including Twitter and Youtube. The report, if its results are taken credibly, will be a boon to Facebook’s advertising platform going forward and may help dispel the recent pessimistic view of the service.
