Editorial Articles

Grant Muckle, Managing Director at Upcast Social, asks if 2012 is the year marketers need to start 'liking' Facebook ads

The latest figures from Experian Hitwise show that in the UK, Facebook accounts for just over half of all visits to social media sites. The huge amount of traffic and wide reach are not the main advantages of Facebook for display advertisers, though. It is the way the site can profile users to ensure pertinent audiences are targeted by advertisers. That ability to segment audiences is playing a role in display advertising’s online renaissance.

Although IAB figures for the first half of 2011 show that £1.3bn of the £2.2bn spent on online advertising was attributed to search, display is the channel showing the most growth. At £510m, it grew by 18 per cent in the first half of the year, compared to 12 per cent for search.
Facebook adverts have always had to contend with the assumption that search is king. Display advertising is often seen as playing a necessary part in raising awareness within an integrated campaign, but it is rarely seen as the channel that will rival search in terms of acquisition.

Advertising technology tool Upcast Social found that when you undertake a fair comparison between search and display, the latter performs just as well, if not better in some circumstances. The trouble has always been that search is believed to be a great converter. But this thinking has been skewed by branded search terms such as ‘John Lewis’ being considered alongside more generic keywords, such as ‘furniture’.

If an online shopper types a brand name into a search engine it is highly possible they are using it as a shortcut to get back to a homepage they were already likely to buy from. When you include branded terms in conversion figures, search appears to perform far better than it really does. Facebook ads are particularly effective at promoting content on Facebook, due to the ability to add social content to the ads. However, drive-to-site Facebook ads used for acquisition have been getting some bad press lately for their low conversion rates, especially in comparison to search. On the surface this appears to be the case. However, we’ve carried out some more detailed analysis which shows Facebook ads performing as well as search in many circumstances, and sometimes, outperforming it.

Using Upcast Social, we found that luxury jewellery performed as well on Facebook adverts as in generic search, while electronic retailing was comparable. With travel, our research suggests that people rely on research, rather than an advert, and so generic terms outperformed display on Facebook.

Charities should certainly take note of these findings. While nobody wakes up and decides to search for a good cause to give money to, they will respond to a display advert. Generic search terms did not obtain any new customers, yet Facebook adverts had a very good 1 per cent conversion rate. These findings show that Facebook adverts can hold their own, in comparison to search, and in some cases provide better ROI.

www.upcastsocial.com