Customer Experience

By Nick Johnson - November 27th, 2013

Who is tweeting, the impact of Facebook on search marketing and how Facebook are going to standardise their analytical metrics.

Facebook impacts paid search marketing performance

In their current report Kenshoo analysed recent paid search results for a leading retailer with more than 2,500 stores in the US. Certain segments of the target audience were exposed to both paid search and Facebook advertising while others were exposed to paid search alone.

The data shows that the paid search audience segments, which were exposed to Facebook advertising generated 30% more return on ad spend. This lift was fuelled by a significantly higher average order value, better click-through rates, and a lower cost-per-acquisition.

“Facebook advertising complements paid search as a way to improve the brand/consumer conversation between searches,” says Kenshoo. “By the time the consumer searches again for an advertiser’s top keywords, he or she may be more likely to click ads and spend more per order on the brand’s site if they’ve also been able to engage with the brand on Facebook. Marketers need to focus on ways to continue the paid search relation- ship with their consumers on social platforms.

“The research presented in this study clearly shows that there is a very powerful opportunity here for those marketers willing to make the effort to uncover these insights and act on the results. With paid search and social advertising representing over half of digital marketing budgets, the time is now to start moving forward in an omni-channel marketing approach and leave behind the single, siloed channel strategy.”

What is clear is that corporations that have a simplistic approach to their social media marketing need to be more sophisticated. Today, social media marketing is multifaceted, and must be integrated into whole campaigns and not seen as an isolated channel.

Who is tweeting?

Corporations that are looking closely at how Twitter factors into their marketing strategy will be interested to read the latest figures from Statista. According to their research only 11% of Americans tweet each month. Compare this to a massive third of Saudi Arabian Twitter users. It can seem as though Twitter has massive traffic. Indeed, the platform can be a great way to develop brand advocacy. But clearly the actual activity that is taking place should be looked at very closely before placing Twitter at the centre of a campaign that relies on retweets within a specific time frame.

Believe in Facebook

One of the major issues that marketers have had with Facebook since its IPO has been a lack of standardised metrics. The introduction of Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) Facebook says: “are the social experts at the forefront of helping marketers and advertisers establish and grow lasting connections with customers. PMDs build apps on Facebook, optimize social plugins, manage ad campaigns, measure performance and develop effective marketing strategies for Facebook.”

Facebook’s Mike Randall told The Drum: “We believe PMDs can help us drive adoption of measurement standards, whether it’s Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) from Nielsen, or helping the industry away from proxy metrics and away from last-click to multi-click attribution models, and other ways of determining lifetime value of a customer beyond just the initial acquisition.”

Clearly Facebook understands that metrics for its platform have been somewhat of a hit and miss affair with a Wild West environment where marketers have been working at the frontier of this science with little in the way of guidance. The PMD initiative could change all that. The so-called developer ecosystem may result in a new measurement platform that the industry sorely needs. Watch this space.

Instagram map engages with fans

Katy Perry has released PrismLights that uses Instagram photos tagged with #KatyUnconditionally to create a unique online map. Linked to her latest single ‘unconditionally’ using Instagram as the source material for the site’s interactive elements is innovative. As more images are logged into the site, the map of the world – make up of prisms – will become more illuminated and animated. And anyone can connect their Instagram account to the site, which will highlight their images.

For brand owners this kind of leveraging of content will become more commonplace. Consumers want to share more content, but need to be able to do this within a familiar environment. With this campaign, the promotion of a new single via Instagram makes these connections easy and engaging.

Until next time….

The Useful Social Media team.