

This year has seen intense scrutiny of the effectiveness of social networks as advertising platforms. Now, big players, such as Facebook and Twitter, are boosting their efforts to prove they play a significant role in the process of conversion.
Facebook, in particular, has been under increasing pressure from investors to prove its mettle in the advertising space and to better monetise its platform. This year, the world's largest social network has already introduced multiple new features for marketers, including ramped-up targeting techniques and mobile advertising options.
Facebook has also been pushing the notion that the "click is king" mentality in online advertising does not make sense for all brand marketers, where actual sales generated by campaigns could be more useful.
In order to prove its point, Facebook is reportedly seeking to provide a means to better quantify the value of its ads with an expanded ad tracking programme called "View Tags".
According to a TechCrunch report, the new feature gives advertisers the ability to drop cookies on users who are shown their ads on Facebook, and allowing the advertiser to check if that user bought something at a later stage and pinpoint exactly which ad that user saw.
The same report says the first View Tag results have shown that as much as 87% of conversions come from views, not clicks. Facebook reportedly began testing the programme a year ago with select partners.
View Tags is in addition to the openly available conversion tracking tool announced by Facebook last week. That feature relies on the advertiser's site detecting the Facebook user ID of someone who converts. This ID is then cross-checked with the list of IDs of users who saw a particular ad, rather than using traditional cookies. This provides the advertiser with a better indication of how successful their campaign may have been.
Reuters quotes eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson as saying the "path to purchase" on Facebook is not as direct as it is on Google, therefore providing information about customer sales conversion would help strengthen Facebook's value proposition for online retailers. "That allows marketers to understand the impact of the Facebook ad on the ultimate purchase."
With the View Tags feature, advertisers can generate cookies and work with approved partners to make their View Tags ads drop them. These cookies provide the advertiser with anonymous demographics of users who see the ads, and how many times,
The TechCrunch report explains: "Then if a viewer makes a purchase, signs up for a service, or takes some other conversion action on the advertiser's site later on, a pixel installed on the site recognises the cookie and informs Facebook which user converted. Advertisers can then check their Facebook ad analytics to see which ad led to the conversion."
The new View Tags beta programme is only open to select partners for the time being, and new admissions must reportedly undergo a privacy audit in order to ensure they do not pull any personally identifiable information about users.
It has been noted that, in the past, if a user noticed a Facebook ad, but later Googled the retailer and made a purchase, Facebook would not be given any of the credit. New tools such as the conversion tracker and View tags are expected to change this, providing a means to measure how Facebook ads may influence the ultimate purchasing decision.
Twitter and retail
This week, Twitter also released the findings of its "Tweets in Action: Retail" study, claiming that people who see tweets from retailers are more likely to visit retail sites and make online purchases.
Co-head of ad research at Twitter, Taylor Schreiner, says: "The study analysed over 7 600 users and their site visitation and purchase behaviour on over 700 retail brand Web sites during the busy back to school season.
"The first group of users was composed of people exposed to at least one Tweet by a retail company. There were two additional control groups: one was made up of US Internet users who visited Twitter, but were not exposed to retailer Tweets and the second represented the average Internet browser."
According to Schreiner, the study found Twitter users visit retail Web sites at a higher rate (95%) than general Internet users (90%).
"This finding is true for both mass retail sites, as well as specific categories like apparel and accessories retailers, and becomes even more pronounced for more niche parts of the retail industry like toys or sporting goods."
Schreiner says that within the analysed timeframe, 27% of general Internet users bought something from a retail site, while Twitter users made purchases at a rate of 33% from the same sites over the same period.
"When Twitter users were exposed to a tweet from a retailer, that purchase rate increased to 39%. This represents a lift of 1.4X and 1.2X, respectively, and is true across a variety of retail categories," says Schreiner. "This means Twitter users arrive on a retail Web site with a higher intent to buy."
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