Uncategorized |

Category: Uncategorized (page 1 of 2)

Combine the Power of Facebook Targeting with Brand New Mobile Inventory

August 19, 2014 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Current State of Mobile Consumption

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:

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.

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.

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!

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.

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 / unifiedsocial / 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)

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 advertising UNIFIED 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 / unifiedsocial / 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.

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.

In 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:

Spanish Dominant
Bilingual
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:

90% increase in overall engagement
41% more efficient CPC (as compared to to the Auto Industry average)
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

Make 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. 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)

Unified Gets awe.sm

May 1, 2014 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

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.

Your marketing is owned, paid, or earned — and so is social

April 8, 2014 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

This week, we begin a series of posts introducing the basics of measuring the ROI of social media marketing. We begin by making sure everyone’s on the same page, terminology-wise.

If you’re an awe.sm user, you’ve probably noticed that we distinguish between Posts and Shares — and if you’re new to awe.sm, or just checking out our demo, you’ll notice this soon. Here’s what we mean.

Social media is marketing — so describe it that way

awe.sm’s motivating principle is that, for businesses, social media is not a mystical being, it’s a form of marketing. Its technology and power are certainly revolutionary, and properly capturing its ROI requires purpose-built measurement, but ultimately social is just another form of marketing. This means you can classify it alongside the other tools in a marketer’s belt.

All media is owned, paid for, or earned

In simpler times, it was easy to categorize your marketing communications: advertising, public relations, and word of mouth. Here’s how you could sort those:

Your owned media — sales brochures, store signage, website copy, white papers, newsletters… — consist of content you produce, distributed on channels you own.
Advertising and PR — radio commercials, print ads, press tours, roadside billboards, late-night infomercials, leaflets dropped from helicopters… — are paid media. You might be amplifying some of your own marketing communications — like paying a publicist to pitch editors, paying a publication to run your content as an advertorial, or renting your neighbor’s building to paint a sign that’s bigger than what fits on your own shop — but if you have to pay for it, it’s paid media. If you stop paying your ad agency, your flack, and your neighbor, this media ceases to exist.
Word of mouth is the holy grail: free marketing for you! When people recommend your product to their friends; when bloggers and journalists discuss you; when your commercial gets free replays in the nightly news… — is earned media. It was that great; you earned it. (Go you!)

These are obviously deeply connected and interdependent — for example, PR agencies take your money on the premise that your paid media will “go viral” and become earned media. And like any classification system, it’s imperfect. But it’s simple enough.

Social is owned, paid, or earned, too

Owned: These are posts you make to your own social channels. Your Tweets; posts to your brand’s Facebook page; Pins to Pinterest albums. This is what most people think of first in social media marketing, and it’s the piece over which you have the most control — but it’s only one piece.

Paid: As social networks mature, they tend to roll out sophisticated advertising tools, and (by sheer coincidence) brands’ organic reach decreases, so paying to amplify one’s own posts, seeding social content with paid influencers, or sponsoring hashtags or discussion topics only continues to grow. From a tracking perspective, paid posts aren’t dissimilar from owned posts — but measuring their performance is even more important.

Earned: Any of your social posts and site content that your followers and visitors share — within a social network by amplifying (like re-Tweeting, re-Pinning, mentioning), or off your site via share buttons or tracked URL-bar sharing. Bang-for-buck, earned sharing is the most powerful form of social media marketing (users promoting your content… for you!) but too often is the least understood.

Measuring the ROI of traditional marketing requires understanding how all these different parts interact and combine. It should be no surprise that measuring the ROI of social media marketing requires a similarly holistic view. To help you optimize and create value, make sense of how your posts and shares perform individually, in aggregate, and in relation to one another.

Now that you have an idea of what we classify how, and why, you’re on your way to being awe.sm, too.

Coming up Thursday: the social media funnel. Too impatient to wait? Want to learn how specifically to optimize your social media marketing strategy? Schedule a demo.

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

5 ways to score with your social media strategy this Valentine’s Day

February 14, 2014 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

As everyone knows, February 14 commemorates the Roman Empire’s murder of Valentinus of Terni — twice: when Emperor Claudius Gothicus’ original sentence of death by clubbing and stoning somehow didn’t do the trick, he was re-sentenced to beheading outside the Flaminian Gate, and this worked. (That’s amore.)

Of course, if you choose to focus instead on St. Valentine’s work as a matchmaker this February 14th, then you know there’s no better time of year to review your social media marketing strategy through a romantic lens. Based on our work measuring and optimizing the performance of social media marketing for some of the world’s biggest brands, here are some simple steps to help you get your leads to say “I do” — without even overpaying for chocolates.

Go long

Just as with real life, there’s nothing stopping you from using social media to score some fleeting romance … but Mardi Gras isn’t for another month, and Valentine’s Day is more commonly associated with finding true love. The smart marketer aspires to acquire and retain customers for the long haul. Social can do more than generate interest for your brand: with proper planning and careful execution, your social campaign can actually lay the groundwork for a mutually fulfilling, committed relationship.

DTR

If you have only a fuzzy notion of what you want out of your social media marketing, you’ll get fuzzy results, so ask yourself in advance, What do I want out of this? Many brands stop at the mere flirtation of Likes and Retweets, but you can — and should — engage customers with an actual business goal in mind and an ROI to measure against. Your goal doesn’t have to be a transaction: it could be a coupon download, webinar registration, mailing list signup, or video view. But know in advance what you’re pursuing. This will guide you as you create your social content and plan your execution.

Emulate this guy

Giacomo Girolamo Casanova planned his dates like you wouldn’t believe. Entire books have been written about the Casanova method: complicated plots, heroes and villains, and gallant outcomes, coupled with meticulous attention to small details, all engineered to overwhelm his beloved with excitement, gratitude, and infatuation.

First of all, think about that the next time you spend 4 minutes lining something up on OpenTable while concurrently brushing your teeth. More importantly, consider every element of your marketing funnel as part of a courtship to win over your customers.

Beyond the superficial charm of a witty Tweet, does your site’s user experience surprise and delight your visitors? Do your copy and interaction design help guide them to a more fulfilling conversion? Do your visitors find content worth sharing, and feel invited to engage more deeply? Like Casanova, script every element of your interactions to attract your prospects to commit. Nowhere does the old adage about failing to plan is planning to fail ring more true.

Pay attention

We don’t recommend going on a date without making eye contact — did he like the wine I picked?, is there something in my teeth?, was that story about my mom funny?… — and you shouldn’t fly blind with social media marketing, either.

When it comes to tortured romantic metaphors, think of social media marketing less like a flock of doves you release once and watch take to the sky, and more like a moonlit gondola which you continue to steer down the canals. The tools now exist to monitor every post from the moment it goes out, and not just the Likes or Retweets it gets out on the social networks, but the site visits, pageviews, and funnel conversions that result. Use this feedback to adjust and optimize over the course of the campaign.

If a given social network or a given style of content performs better, don’t be afraid to switch things up. On one recent campaign, an awe.sm customer launched with the intention of relying heavily upon influencer tweets, but less than a week in realized that earned social posts attracted more valuable traffic, so they quickly upped the size of their share buttons. Don’t be afraid to switch things up and do more of what works — just like those killer stories about Mom.

Be yourself

Keep your messaging true to your brand voice, and be transparent about your intentions. You can only truly love those who love you back, so pre-qualify your customers by accurately representing the value you provide. If you steer clear of gimmicks or gotchas, those who engage with your content, visit your site, and proceed down your funnel stand the best chance of converting into a life-long fulfilling relationship … or at least a happy customer.

Love is a battlefield, so suit up. This Valentine’s Day, you’ve got this, you old heartbreaker, you.

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

Your customers’ conversations span multiple networks; why don’t your analytics?

December 31, 2013 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

In case you missed it, this week I’ve had the opportunity to post on Jack Myers’ MediaBizBlog Network which explains why, in order to understand the recent sensational spike in holiday shoppers’ use of mobile devices, it’s essential to understand consumers’ social media activity.

Focusing on the mobile device is only half the story. You’ll get truly valuable insights to help fine-tune marketing plans by also looking at how consumers are acting on that device.

It’s a quick and useful read — I recommend you check it out — but I wanted to highlight one of the points I raised there: Not only does social activity drive mobile commerce, but specifically social conversations that span multiple social networks and channels.

Understanding how word spreads across these networks is essential, and it’s also tricky. Neither traditional site analytics nor any individual social network’s tracking is accurate; you need closed-loop social attribution.

Referrer madness

You’re likely somewhat familiar with referrers. As a simple example, imagine I’m browsing the page http://www.coolsite.com/article123, I see a neat writeup about one of your products, and I click a link from that article back to your site. Once I get there, I view a page, maybe a few, and then make a purchase.

Your site analytics tool captured that I was referred by coolsite.com/article123, and attributed my visit, pageviews, and conversions to that source. That’s valuable knowledge for you to have, and it’s the backbone of site analytics. So far, so good.

But, now, suppose that instead of learning about your site from an article on coolsite.com, I learned about it from one of my friends while browsing Twitter on my phone? Plenty of research (and common sense) suggests these Tweets are far more persuasive than site links, let alone ads. But if you try to find these Tweets in your site analytics, you’ll come up short.

If you’re lucky, you’ll see traffic referred by Twitter’s domain t.co — and even this isn’t guaranteed. And you definitely won’t see which specific Tweet drove the visit.

Hairball of Confusion

If you can’t track which specific Tweet drove a visit, pageview, or purchase, then you’re in the dark. Good luck sorting out whether my valuable visit came from my friend’s Tweet or your own social media marketing team’s activity on Facebook.

But what if you try to work around this using Twitter’s analytics platform, and their recently announced conversion attribution tool? No dice: this only works with promoted Tweets.

And even if my friend’s Tweet were promoted, so that Twitter did track conversions from the promoted Tweet, you’d still be missing a major piece of the story: why did my friend Tweet?If word of mouth is so effective, you’ll want to know what motivates these valuable conversations. And referrer analysis or any individual network’s conversion tracking are completely ineffective here.

The Pin is mightier than the sword

SPOILER ALERT: Here’s what actually happened. Your social media team made a Pin about one of your cool items. My friend, browsing Pinterest, liked what she saw and clicked through to your site. Once there, she made a purchase and Tweeted about it — perhaps by clicking a social sharing button on your site, or by using her smartphone’s share-to-Twitter feature. I saw the Tweet, clicked back to your site, and made a purchase.

Brilliant! This is why you pay a marketing team to hang out on Pinterest all day… and it worked!

But that conversation spanned your Pin, my friend, Twitter, and my iPhone. And using referrer-based attribution and individual networks’ analytics tools to connect the dots between posts on multiple social networks and visits from different referrers isn’t just difficult, it’s impossible.

This is a big problem. If a growing amount of online shopping happens on mobile (it does), and mobile activity is driven by social (it is), and conversations span multiple social networks (they do), then gaining visibility into how social drives ROI is critical, and relying on old methods just won’t cut it.

Help is on the way

There is good news: it is possible to connect the dots. awe.sm does this by creating a closed attribution loop, capturing details about every social post made by you and your site visitors, and tracking multiple generations of sharing, even when they span multiple social networks.

As mobile drives more and more of your traffic (and conversions), it becomes critically important to understand how to engage customers in mobile. The data shows that social is one of the most effective and efficient ways to reach and engage mobile users. Simply put, being more successful in mobile than your competition requires that you accurately understand the viral pathways and ROI of your social media marketing. Let’s get in touch.

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

Category: Uncategorized (page 1 of 2)

Combine the Power of Facebook Targeting with Brand New Mobile Inventory

Facebook – A Big New Player in the Video Arena

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

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

Archives

Tags

Recent Posts

Categories

Recent Comments

Meta