Author: unifiedsocial (page 1 of 8)

Combine the Power of Facebook Targeting with Brand New Mobile Inventory

August 19, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Current State of Mobile ConsumptionIMG_5942

It’s 2PM on a Monday afternoon. How many times have you checked your phone today? Mobile consumption has reached an all-time high. In fact, people keep their smartphones with them all but 2 hours of the day1! Talk about separation anxiety. But you may be wondering, how exactly are people consuming this information on their phones?

86% of time spent on mobile is spent within a mobile app2. Mobile applications have taken center stage as the go-to source of how people of all ages consume information and communicate with the world around them. So what does this mean for advertisers? It’s a chance for marketers to reach their audience outside of the Facebook Feed while still leveraging the benefits of Facebook Targeting.

So what is the Audience Network?

 

screen-shot-2014-04-30-at-11-02-59-am

Facebook created a way for brands to extend their campaigns beyond the Facebook News Feed and into the mobile app experience. With the Audience network, brands will have access to a network of over 400 applications where they can take advantage of the mass reach and powerful targeting on Facebook.

 

Q&A

Here are the 5 questions you should ask when considering if the Audience Network is the right solution for you:

graph-3 1)     What strategies are supported by the Audience Network?

The Audience Network is designed to drive key business objectives, including mobile app installs and app engagement. Facebook has plans to open this up to more marketing objectives in the future.

 

photo-1 2)     What kind of creative and specs do I need to use?

Conveniently, brands won’t need to upload new creative for ads in the Audience Network.  The same assets used in the News Feed can also be used for the network.

 

aim-1 3)     What kind of targeting is available for the Audience Network?

All targeting available on Facebook is also available on the Audience Network. Talk about icing on the cake!

 

activity-monitor-1  4)     What kind of data can I collect with the Audience Network?

Advertisers can measure app engagements, conversions, demographic information and more if the app they are promoting is integrated with Facebook’s SDK, a toolkit for software developers that incorporates Facebook into their app. The results can also be broken out separately to show performance on News Feed vs. Audience Network.

 

smart-phone-2 5)     What kind of apps are in the network?

Facebook is currently using a blind network of 400 apps, although we do know that Facebook has partnerships with some of the top apps in ecommerce, gaming, utility, and publishing.

 

We are eager to see the success brands will have with this new mobile network currently available for all advertisers. If your brand wants to extend their Facebook campaign into new mobile inventory with the power of Facebook targeting, then the Audience Network is definitely the right solution for you!

 

1 IDC Always Connected Report, May 2013

2 Flurry Blog April 2014

Facebook – A Big New Player in the Video Arena

August 4, 2014 / / 0 Comments

How much video have you watched today?

How much digital video have you consumed today? According to eMarketer, you are well on your way to watching 55 minutes of digital video today, with more than half of that coming on a mobile device. You are also one of millions of video viewers, a number projected to be 204 million viewers by 2017.

(eMarketer, Digital Video Roundup, 2013)

It is impossible for Marketers to avoid this trend, as reflected in their marketing budget trends. US digital video ad spend is estimated to increase by a whopping 41.9% in 2014 which equates to $5.96 billion. But it does not stop there. By 2017, this spend is estimated to reach a staggering $9.1B.

 (eMarketer, June 2014)

facebook-video-mobile

 

Measurable Facebook Video is Now Here

Facebook is certainly no exception to this trend, with video views doubling over the past 6 months alone. The recent enhancements to their video metrics, now provide advertisers with a deeper level of understanding of how people are engaging with their content, particularly when it comes to paid vs. organic.

measurable facebook video

So what are these metrics, and how do you read them? The breakdown below gives you a quick 101 of what you need to know:

  • Video Views are only counted when a video is viewed for 3 seconds or longer.
  • Unique Video Views are the number of people that have viewed your video for 3 seconds or longer.
  • Average Duration Of Video View is the average amount of time spent viewing your video.
  • Audience Retention Graph shows the percentage of views at each second of your video.
  • Video Views To 25%; 50%, 75%, 95% and 100% shows the number of views that reached a certain percentage point of your video
  • Cost Per Video View is the average cost of a video view for paid amplification.

 

Unified’s World Cup Success with Facebook Video

fifa world cup advertisingUNIFIED recently partnered with one of the world’s largest Quick Serve Restaurant chains to track the success of their FIFA World Cup Video content across 53 different countries. Through our Business Intelligence team we were able to track every piece of video content posted on each local page and report on it using Facebook’s enhanced video metrics, also rolling the results up to regional and global levels. The reports enabled the client to better understand how the content resonated within each region and which were the most cost efficient countries and regions to reach for this global initiative.

 

2014 - Poised For Strong Marketing Adoption

As video consumption continues its significant growth trajectory, advertisers can now invest their digital video advertising budgets in a much smarter way. Facebook’s enhanced video analytics allow for the analysis of the channel effectiveness as well as the content and messaging. Combined with Facebook’s precision targeting, Facebook Video is the social video solution many marketers have been waiting for.

Facebook and Nielsen Select Unified As A Finalist In Online Campaign Ratings Challenge

August 1, 2014 / / 0 Comments

This spring, twelve Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers from around the world descended on London and Menlo Park, Calif. for two day-long challenges to demonstrate their social media software and marketing expertise. The challenges included integration of the Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings™ reporting application programming interface (API), among other components, to create better processes and a more seamless experience for brand advertisers.

We’re proud to say that Unified was selected as a Finalist in this competitive challenge to better integrate Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings into Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) ecosystem. More than 600 brand and agency customers can now access Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings reports that provide actionable new insights into their Facebook campaign performance.

Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings combines Nielsen panel data with aggregated, anonymous, privacy-protected demographic information from participating data providers. Campaign reporting is available daily, providing vital delivery information in-flight to both advertisers and publishers. The recently announced availability of comprehensive smartphone and tablet measurement in Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings provides clients with a complete view of their digital audience for the first time. Nielsen not only provides highly precise demographics on a campaign running across platforms, but will also provide a precise count of how many consumers saw an ad only on a PC, only on mobile and on both—for total and device-specific reach.

Using the Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings API, Unified will provide the ability to retrieve, analyze and report Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings data for campaigns that are using the Nielsen system.

Customers can now track and report metrics that include:

  • Reach
  • Impressions
  • Gross Rating Points (GRP)
  • On Target % across a number of categories, including date, demographics, DMA, placement and site

We look forward to introducing powerful new functionality based on the Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings API in the future.

Marketing to a Hispanic audience on Facebook? Here are 4 Tips To Maximize Your Targeting.

July 21, 2014 / / 0 Comments

facebook hispanic language targeting

As any digital marketer knows, targeting is vital to the success of online ad campaigns. Without strategic targeting, your ad spend goes wasted on unqualified traffic and optimization efforts fall short. In most cases, digital ad platforms, such as Facebook, are constantly releasing new ways to zero in on our audiences. However, if you’re attempting to target people based on a specific ethnicity, you’ve likely found your options to be limited.

hispanic targetingIn the past, targeting people according to ethnicity was executed mainly through broadcast television networks – via channels like Univision and Telemundo – where advertisers were able to reach a Hispanic audience at scale.

In the digital space, advertisers attempt to replicate the reach of broadcast TV by leveraging contextual targeting, creative keyword strategies and interest targeting to find loopholes – though success rates are low.

The good news? If you’re targeting a Hispanic audience, that’s all about to change.

With 23 million registered Hispanic users, Facebook is putting a spotlight on the audience – leading the charge to help advertisers tap into a hyper social and savvy segment. For the first time, marketers will be able to reach the audience with precise digital targeting at scale… and considering the demographic’s purchasing power of $1.2 Trillion dollars, that’s hardly something to scoff at!

Now, is the ability to target this audience totally new to Facebook’s ad platform? No.

Back in July of 2013 Facebook released a US Hispanic Affinity Targeting Segment for brands to utilize based on factors such as Hometown and Pages Liked. However, with Facebook’s recent announcement of their new language preference setting, our opportunity for precision has now greatly increased.

With Facebook’s new Hispanic language preference, your audience is divided into three segments:

  1. Spanish Dominant
  2. Bilingual
  3. English Dominant

This segmentation allows advertisers to reach their Hispanic audience, using an individual’s language of choice. With that, ads fit in more seamlessly with the user’s social experience as they appear to the user in the same language that he or she uses to communicate with friends and family.

Here at Unified we were invited to be one of the first BETA testers for the new release. In order to test it out, we worked with a Fortune 500 Automotive brand to drive engagement around a car launch leveraging the Hispanic language targeting. The results were outstanding.

Here’s a quick look at what we saw: more efficient CPC

  1. 90% increase in overall engagement
  2. 41% more efficient CPC (as compared to to the Auto Industry average)
  3. 364% higher CTR on mobile vs. desktop

Thinking about getting started with Facebook’s Hispanic language targeting for your brand?

Here are the top 4 things you need to know in order to maximize the effectiveness of your campaign:

1. Tailor your copy to the language segment you are targeting

languageMake sure you’re “speaking” to your audience in their language of choice. Use only Spanish copy for your Spanish Dominant audience and considering testing a combination of the English and Spanish – or unique variations of each – for your Bilingual segment.

FACT: CPG advertisers have seen +25% increase in click-through rate (CTR) and -19.9% decrease in CPC’s upon aligning creative messaging to a specific language segment demonstrating a deeper level of engagement with the audience. (Facebook Internal Data, 2014)

 

2. Target people that are about to experience a life-changing event such as getting married, buying a home or the birth of a child

Combine language targeting with life event targeting as life-changing moments evoke stronger need-based purchases in many categories. wedding rings By focusing on these life-changing moments you can reach your audience when they are in the right frame of mind to make a purchase.

FACT: The Hispanic market over indexes on life changing events as compared to Non-Hispanic markets. (Facebook Internal Data, 2014)

 

3. Align your campaign with US national holidays and Hispanic specific holidays

Stay relevant and drive more engagement by aligning your content with upcoming events celebrated within the Hispanic community.

 

4. Make it mobile

Capitalize on the demographic’s heavy mobile consumption habits by ensuring your campaign is geared around mobile. For example, use mobile app install ads where relevant, ensure the landing pages you are driving traffic to are optimized for mobile, and use rich, hi res images that emulate the content a user expects to see in their News Feed.

FACT: On average, Facebook and Instagram make up 22% of the total time the Hispanic demographic spends on mobile every day. (comScore, Key Measures and Mobile Metrix US, April 2014)

Track Social Success: Unified Integrates awe.sm with Hootsuite

July 16, 2014 / / 0 Comments

awesm-twitter-engagement

Normally, we like to shake things up in the social space — giving you new approaches to understanding and tracking the success of your social strategies.

Today, we’d like to focus on keeping things simple.

Rather than disrupt the tools and processes you’ve put in place to execute a killer social strategy, we’d like to shed some light on a recent integration we’ve set up to compliment them.

We know that much of the work that goes into your social strategy is the distribution of your content. We understand the time that goes into this portion of the process and the fact that the processes used here must scale as you increase your distribution. If you’re lucky, you’ve created a well oiled machine — with a team that’s innovative but also consistent. And in this case, incorporating new technology into the flow can be daunting… We hear you and as a result, we’re making it a point to integrate and deploy Unified’s technology throughout the social marketing landscape.

Our most recent integration is Hootsuite.

As one of the most popular social platforms used to distribute content, we put a focus on partnering with Hootsuite so that social teams are able to leverage Unified’s awe.sm technology to understand what content is driving results. The ability to learn and optimize is key when marketers are looking to take their owned marketing strategy to the next level.

Enterprise Hootsuite users will now be able to create awe.sm short links within their Hootsuite account — without interrupting their flow or adding any new steps.

The integration allows users to expand their social marketing activity by providing a holistic view of their social funnel, tracking analytics from the post to the on-site conversion. With the awe.sm integration, customers can optimize the return of their social media marketing investments by attributing real business results to their social activity.

Through the awe.sm integration in HootSuite, you can:

  • Create awe.sm links: Shorten, customize, and track social activity on the links you share across your social media channels.
  • Track conversions: Bridge the gap between social engagement and web analytics with awe.sm’s closed-looped system.
  • Identify content that resonates: Determine which of your posts make the most impact, what drives the most traffic and engagement, and what messaging starts the most conversations.
  • Discover top performers: Find out who is amplifying your message and sharing it with their followers. Gain visibility on what content they share, measure the impact they create, and connect with them directly.

For more on the integration, we invite you to check out the recording of our recent webinar:

The $65,000 Tweet: How to track social to offline and digital sales

 

5 Things You Need to Know about Facebook’s Right Hand Column Redesign

June 26, 2014 / / 0 Comments

image

This past April, Facebook announced a complete redesign of their right hand column (RHC) ad products and as of June 24th, we’re starting to see the new layout pop up live on the site.

Now, we know what you’re thinking:  Facebook has made changes in the past… What’s so special about this one and how will it affect my social campaigns?

As it turns out, unlike many of Facebook’s design updates, this release is a bit more exciting in that it allows you to draw more attention to your right hand column ads with a visual layout that’s more consistent with the those that appear in the News Feed.

As you well know, your audience engages heavily with images throughout their social experience — and the new right hand ad allows you to play into this via paid campaigns. Rather than come off as an interruption or intrusion, the new layout allows your ads to better compliment your audience’s social experience.

Here’s a look at the top 5 things you need to know about the release:

1)     Bigger Share of Voice

With the new design, brands will have a bigger share of voice (SOV) on all of Facebook. Users will see only two of the larger ads on all pages including the Homepage. You will no longer need to fight as hard for clicks and will have more of your audience’s attention.

2)     More Engagement for Everyone!

image

Facebook is reporting that they saw 3x the engagement with the new layout as compared to the previous design. As a result of obtaining more valuable real estate, the layout aims to produce more qualified clicks from a precise audience.

3)     Consistent Look = Positive Perception

Previously, News Feed ads reported a significantly higher CTR compared to RHC ads. With this release, the RHC ads will resemble News Feed ads — encouraging users to have a more positive perception of the RHC ads and increased engagement.

4)     The Magic Number =  1.91:1

image

The new ads will leverage the same aspect ratio (1.91:1) as ads within the News Feed, allowing for seamless campaign set-up, cohesive creative, and saved time. Marketers will no longer need a unique image for ads in the right-hand column. Additionally, RHC ads will be restricted to the same 20% text per photo policy that is enforced across New Feed ads.

5)     Profit off of early adoption

Facebook started displaying the new Right Hand Column ad layout as of June 24th. Upon each page load, users will see either the new layout with only 2 ads in the RHC, or the older layout with multiple ads. We recommend you update your existing campaigns ASAP to take advantage of the new layout as you’ll be one of the first to grab the attention of your audience using the new look and feel. Plus, you’ll want to start collecting data/results using the new layout so you can start optimizing your campaigns accordingly.

Timing and Next Steps

Facebook is allowing advertisers a grace period before you are required to move existing RHC ads to the new format. You have until September 1st to update creative. After that date, Facebook will stop delivering all ads with outdated creative.

 image

We are excited to see how the new design will not only drive more qualified traffic, but also help marketers drive reach in a cost-effective manner.  With bigger real estate, increased engagements, and more SOV brands are almost guaranteed to see a positive ROI.

Leave us a comment and let us know how your campaigns perform in the new layout.

Questions? We’ll be watching the comments here so leave us a note and we’ll do our best to help.

The Importance of Social Attribution

May 12, 2014 / / 0 Comments

sheldon

Unified’s acquisition of awe.sm made headlines across the industry last week along with AOL’s and Google’s acquisition announcements of attribution technologies.  The advertising industry is huge, with nearly $600 billion projected to be spent by 2016 and $170 billion to be spent in digital.  When marketers are spending money at this scale, it’s incredibly important that they be able to manage attribution effectively across all channels.

Of the $170 billion in future digital ad spend, social and mobile are the two fastest growing categories with each experiencing over 20% annual growth rates (display annual growth rate 6%, search annual growth rate 13%). A driving factor for this growth can be contributed to hypergrowth of social mobile users.  In fact, Facebook recently reported that they have exceeded 1 billion monthly active users on phones and tablets. As a result of this shift to mobile, content consumption is migrating to the newsfeed faster than ever and marketers are now required to optimize campaigns for social success, including TV, search and email.

In addition to the social and mobile growth, CMOs are demanding more ROI from their campaign initiatives and are requiring marketing intelligence to make better business decisions. One of the biggest challenges in digital, including social, is effectively tracking and measuring attribution. It’s reported that over 50% of all social referrals/sharing occurs outside of social networks and has essentially been invisible and unmeasurable.

awe.sm has built one of the most comprehensive toolsets available to help marketers attribute, measure and track conversion events anywhere across digital. awe.sm’s social attribution engine tracks conversion events such as purchases, comments, product interactions, event registrations, lead-form completions, referrals, or sharing a link with others via email, text message, or social media.  awe.sm’s technology also proves the true impact of multiple generations of sharing even outside of the social networks.

The integration of awe.sm’s attribution technology into our Social Operating Platform means that CMOs will get visibility into the full value of social sharing for the first time. With the addition of awe.sm’s powerful toolset, Unified’s Social Operating Platform now gives marketers visibility into powerful customer activity that accounts for over 50% of social referrals.

This transaction is an important step for Unified, and it will deliver huge value to an industry that can now prove that social behavior is driving success across social, mobile, digital, and offline marketing channels. I’m very excited about awe.sm and how it fits into Unified’s vision.

Unified Gets awe.sm

May 1, 2014 / / 0 Comments

jason

Over the past three years, our team has worked tirelessly to provide smart social marketers with the best content, insights, and advertising applications, built on the industry’s most powerful platform.  Unified’s 600+ customers have used the Social Operating Platform to drive incredible results on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and beyond, with their data residing in our authoritative system of record.

We’ve also learned a lot about consumer behavior.  In particular, we know that social sharing isn’t limited to what happens within the major social platforms. Content that is shared on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is then often emailed, shared via instant message, or sent to friends via text messages.  This sharing is inherently social, but has essentially been invisible, since to date no one has been able to measure it effectively. That changes today.

Unified has acquired awe.sm, a social media measurement platform that supports attribution, conversion and social action tracking across all marketing channels.  awe.sm has developed incredible technology that makes all social behavior measurable, across social, mobile, digital, and offline channels.

Unified is also now providing an open API platform which allows us to provide customers with unprecedented visibility into their paid and owned media data along with cross-channel social measurement as an infrastructure as a service. This will enable brands, agencies, technology vendors, media publishers, content producers, and influencers the ability to build multi-generational social measurement into the foundation of their offerings.

Leveraging Unified’s system of record and our patent-pending Earned Media Measurement Framework, ALL market platforms - including publishing platforms, social advertising companies, traditional display and search providers, television marketers, and out of home solutions - have the potential to measure the powerful referral traffic generated via social channels.

We’ll also be able to measure the referral traffic from paid and owned channels that drive increased adoption and installs of mobile applications – a trend that is top of mind with Facebook’s launch of deep linking at f8.

Unified is now positioned to become the central system of record for the marketing ecosystem to standardize on as social referrals become the standard currency of the web. We couldn’t be more excited to drive this future forward into the market.

Our press release and FAQ contain full details.

Older posts

Recent Posts

Categories

Recent Comments

Meta

© 2014

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑