It’s always interesting to see what the new happenings are with Facebook as they continue to slowly build their name in the marketing world. While looking around, I realized that the talk of the town was Facebook’s new partnership with Datalogix, a company that measures the affect that online ads have on offline purchases. The partnership will be one way for Facebook to assure marketers that their Facebook marketing campaigns are working. It is often difficult to measure the impact that online advertising has on consumers when they shop offline, and it can give marketers a slightly skewed perception of the performance of their campaigns. Facebook wants to make sure that no result is missed, assuring the world that they are a viable marketing source.
Brad Smallwood, Facebook’s head of measurement and insights, gave some insight into just how beneficial the partnership will be (reported by Financial Times).
Facebook said it is paying Datalogix for the data-matching. So far, the two companies have measured 45 campaigns and in 70 per cent of cases, for every dollar a marketer spent on Facebook it earned an additional $3 in incremental sales.
Apparently, Facebook’s new partner has accrued purchasing data from 70 million households in the US which has been taken from the loyalty programs of over 1,000 retailers. Using the email addresses from these programs and matching them to the email addresses used to create accounts on Facebook, the company can see if people bought items at a store after seeing an advertisement on Facebook.
This type of partnership is not new for Facebook, though. The company has already been partnered with Nielsen, the well-known marketing analytics company, since 2009, and also has a partnership with comScore, another famous analytics company. Facebook is trying to make sure that no stone goes unturned for its marketing clients, so that the results they think they are seeing with Facebook’s marketing platform are completely true.
Of course there is the possible issue of infringement upon Facebook’s privacy policies. It has been reported that there is fear that this new partnership will contradict the settlement that Facebook came to with the US Federal Trade Commission, in which the charges were for violating privacy promises to customers. This is especially concerning, since Facebook users will not be able to opt out of the Datalogix studies unless they actually visit the Datalogix website themselves instead of having the option on Facebook.
Aside from the possible privacy issues that the partnership may cause, it will definitely be a fantastic new method for gathering information regarding the results of Facebook advertising. Since analyzing results is just as important as creating results, Facebook has made the right move with another partnership with a data analytics company. Facebook has, for a while now, been striving to be the best in social media marketing, and the only way to achieve that is to make marketers think that they are the best. Therefore, the company wants all results to be accounted for, so that Facebook receives all the credit that is due to them.
