It’s Time to Change the Discussion on Measuring Facebook Effectiveness

Comscore is preparing to publish new findings about the effectiveness of paid and earned media exposure on Facebook next week at the ARF Audience Measurement 7.0 conference in New York, along with our release of a new white paper, The Power of Like 2: How Social Marketing Works. Through our research, which examines the impact on consumer behavior as a result of media exposure (i.e. seeing a brand message), we are gaining critical new insights that show Facebook earned media is having a statistically significant positive lift on people’s purchasing of a brand.

Our research uses a test vs. control methodology to compare the behavior, such as brand site engagement and purchase, of similar groups of individuals with their primary difference being whether or not they were exposed to a media impression. For brand advertisers, this methodology has been commonly used over the years to measure branding effects of advertising due to the realization that clicks are a weak indicator of true campaign performance because they ignore the importance of simply viewing an advertising message (otherwise known as the ‘view-through’ impact of exposure). The lifts in behavior as a result of exposure may be immediate or latent, often occurring weeks or even months following exposure.

We are excited to share the new results of this research because we think it will help shed new light on how Facebook marketing really works.

Unfortunately much of the recent discussion on Facebook effectiveness has gotten the story wrong. Case in point, a Reuters headline earlier this week said that said “Facebook Comments, Ads Don't Sway Most Users: Poll”, and the article cited a stat that “four out of five Facebook users have never bought a product or service as a result of advertising or comments on the social network site.”

In this particular case, it appears that the research method used was a survey, which asked users about whether or not they had ever been influenced to purchase as a result of exposure on Facebook. While surveys can be useful in assessing ad effectiveness lifts across attitudinal dimensions such as brand awareness, favorability and purchase intent, people tend not to provide very accurate assessments of their own behavior. And their accuracy in recalling their own behavior over an extended period of time can be especially unreliable. People might be able to accurately tell you how many times they have eaten at a restaurant in the past week, but they would probably do a poor job estimating that number over the past three months.

This inability to accurately recall past behavior also seems to be evident in another survey response where a higher percentage of Facebook users say they are spending less time on the site today vs. six months ago. Comscore’s behavioral measurement of engagement, where time spent on sites is electronically and passively observed, indicates the opposite – that time spent per user is actually up a few percent in that period. In the case of the internet, people spend time doing dozens if not hundreds of things online each day. It is highly unlikely that their recall of the exact sites they visited, the amount of time they spent there or their specific exposure to brand messages will be closely aligned with what actually happened.

More importantly, people generally don’t like to believe that advertising actually has an effect on their behavior, even though time and time again various forms of advertising research have shown that it does. So, how people respond to a question asking whether or not Facebook advertising (or any other advertising for that matter) has affected their purchase behavior may end up having little correlation with their actual behavior.

It’s time to advance this discussion of marketing and advertising effectiveness, but doing so requires that the debate centers on meaningful measurement approaches, not on self-reported recollection. The Power of Like 2 will present some new ways for thinking about effectiveness research in the social channel. Stay tuned to find out more next week.