Facebook tells advertisers to forget the clicks

Forget the clicks, they only tell half the story. That’s the message Facebook is preparing to send out to advertisers as it unveils new data to show that its advertising mechanisms do actually work.

According to Reuters, the world’s largest social network will point out that the number of clicks, the metric currently most employed for measuring the effectiveness of an online campaign, is flawed and doesn’t tell the whole story. It will tell brands that they should instead focus on putting out better campaigns.

Facebook argues that fewer than one percent of in-store sales related to a Facebook advert come from people clicking on an advert. “We ended up in this world where the click is king,” said Brad Smallwood, Facebook’s head of measurement and insights.

That situation is, of course, largely down to the fact that the click model works, and works well, for Google. The assumption therefore was that the model could be applied to all other online advertising platforms.

Except it doesn’t. When someone searches for your company, or something related to your company, and clicks on your ad then the job is done. That’s simply not the case with Facebook. It’s more about getting eyes on your ad than getting people to click on it.

That’s why Facebook now claims to be more interested in fine-tuning the number of times a particular consumer sees an ad as well as ensuring that the ad has reached all of its target audience — far more effective techniques.

In order to do so, it says, it’s developed a new measurement tool in conjunction with audience measurement company Datalogix. The social network says it can now provide companies with actual in-store sales that their ad campaigns on Facebook have generated — a more useful piece of feedback than total clicks.

“Using the Datalogix tool, we’ll able to understand what that sweetspot is,” Smallwood said.

Reuters also reports that some have expressed concern that the new tool might violate Facebook’s privacy policies, although Smallwood insists that it doesn’t receive any personal user information from Datalogix.