Marketing Pilgrim

Remember when your mom used to say, “if all of your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?” Statically, yeah, you probably would because it’s been proven that our behavior is influenced by the behavior and approval of our peers.

This is the idea behind Facebook’s ‘social endorsement’ ad program where you see who on your friend’s list “liked” an ad. Nielsen did a study and found that an ad with social context upped ad recall by 10% and also pumped up the intent to buy and awareness.

Facebook is now ready to test the numbers themselves as they’ve added social endorsement metrics to your Ads Manager.

When you visit your Ads Manager on Facebook, you’ll now find a column labeled “Social %.”  This tells you what percentage of your ads with social endorsements received clicks.

In addition, there are a few new columns in the “Advertising Performance Report.”

1. Social impressions: ad impressions that include social endorsements

2. Social clicks: clicks on ads that originated from an ad with social endorsements (e.g. a social impression)

3. Social %: percentage of total ad impressions with social endorsements

4. Social CTR: social clicks divided by social impressions

All of this is well and good, but what can you do with the results? Beyond proving that social endorsements do encourage ad clicks, where does it go from here?

For Facebook, it could mean a hike in ad spending if people are able to see a clear distinction between average display ads and “likeable” ones. For the marketer, I’m not sure. Will seeing these metrics make you change how you run your ads on Facebook? I’d like to know.

Source:Facebook. Graphic from Nielsen