Likes, Comments, Shares Aren’t a Reliable Proxy for Success, Period.
By: James Mullally
Tags: Advertising, Measurement, Marketing, Facebook, Social Media

On social platforms like Facebook, engagements — likes, comments, shares, and click-throughs long dominated conversation around the particular success of a post. Yet, as Facebook writes:

“Online engagement metrics are a proxy for interest, but they are not a reliable indicator of the content’s persuasiveness. Persuasive content influences your audience in a way that helps move your business.”

In reality, these engagements do not effectively correlate with business results for brand content. Facebook research has found that “content doesn’t need to be persuasive to elicit an engagement.” and inversely, “not all persuasive content elicits an engagement”.

Campaigns that wish to drive brand awareness cannot therefore be measured by the level of engagement, as a potential customer can inherently notice and be influenced by that content without interacting with it. In fact, a 2012 Facebook & Datalogix ROI study found that:

“more than 90% of offline sales come from people who don’t interact with ads during the campaign.”

Engagement on Facebook — When it Matters

Engagements Don’t Represent Your Audience

One of the biggest issues with engagements is that they may be more indicative of a user’s behaviors (e.g. a “clicky” user) rather than the effectiveness of the content. In fact, analysis of content from major brands at BBDO increasingly shows that those engaging with content registered outside of the target audience the brand wished to impact.

For example, we took real-life Brand X and looked at the demographics of people who engaged with its promoted content, which included all formats across Facebook and Instagram.

While this brand’s target skewed relatively young, data showed that the engagement rate for those under 34 was at 3%, but the highest engagers were 64+ at 22%, with the engagement rate increasing dramatically with every new age block. However, when we examined Estimated Ad Recall Lift by age, we found all blocks consistently performed at or above benchmarks.

Depending on who you are targeting, engagements may be more of a red herring than they are an indicator of positive responses from your target.

Invest in Equitable Measures of Success

As brands shift away from shiny engagement metrics on Facebook, it is essential to invest in studies that can more concretely and more thoroughly measure the impact of campaign efforts on consumers.

Nielsen Brand Effects studies, for instance, have long been used to analyze the impact of Facebook ads in key brand metrics. Consumers see a piece of advertising and shortly thereafter answer a survey to help determine the impact of an ad in shifting awareness, attitudes, favorability, intent, or preference.

Brands also have the ability to track the effect of their work in driving business objectives through studies such as Datalogix or marketing mix modeling. Datalogix studies can help marketers understand how their Facebook spends impact offline sales by matching purchasing data for 70 million American households via loyalty cards and programs. By pulling and anonymizing information associated with their Facebook accounts, marketers can start to see the difference in sales when someone is exposed to a Facebook ad.

Marketing mix modeling studies can also pinpoint the value of social marketing in driving business objectives, but are not available in the short term.

However, as short-term metrics continue to dominate marketing, brands have the opportunity to track metrics that demonstrate the largest probability of success — namely the 10 Second Retention Rate and Estimated Ad Recall Lift.

10-SECOND RETENTION RATE:

The Facebook Marketing Science commissioned Nielsen to analyze the value of Facebook video in driving three key brand metrics: lifts in ad recall, brand awareness, and purchase intent.

Initial data analysis showed that from the moment a video was viewed, there were statistical lifts across each of the three metrics, even amongst those who did not watch the video but did see the impression.

Further investigation then focused on how video duration potentially impacted the metrics outlined. The results revealed a notice lift in cumulative impact when viewers were retained to the :3 second mark. The most statistically significant results, however, came from users who were retained to the :10 mark, with massive lifts seen across ad recall, brand awareness, and purchase intent.

The longer a user is engaged with a piece of content the larger the effect. Yet, the strong correlation between 10-second with impact-led metrics demonstrates a huge opportunity for marketers to measure effectiveness and optimizes their work on the platform in the short-game.

ESTIMATED AD RECALL LIFT:

Marketers can also track a Facebook-calculated proxy metric known as “estimated ad recall lift” (EARL), which measures the impact of ads on driving ad recall by comparing the reach of an ad, coupled with the relative time users spend looking at the ad. This is then weighted against historical data for ad recall taken from 300 previous campaigns. This metric offers a more effective proxy for real-time measurement of the lift in ad recall a brand can expect to gain from a campaign. Importantly, EARL normalizes for users’ scrolling habits, so the quick scroll a younger user might be used to and the slower scroll of an older user are taken into account, along with historical ad recall lift data.

While an attractive measurement, brands should not rely on this metric alone, given that estimates employ a degree of probability.

To gain a more robust look at the effectiveness of work in driving awareness and return on investment, further tracking studies should be employed alongside.

This article is part three of a five part series highlighting BBDO Comms Planning’s latest report, About Face: A New Approach to Facebook for Big Brands.

To download this white paper, click here.