Instead, the real value lies in overall impressions, according to Smallwood. Reach and impressions have long formed the backbone of TV advertising, but online ads have tended to favor per-click metrics, a concrete way to know how many people saw an ad. Yet, click-throughs typically make up a tiny 5 percent or less of an ad's overall impression numbers.
Facebook hopes to determine the true value of an ad impression. It wants to know, for example, if Facebook users exposed to a multitude of V8 ads more likely to buy the tomato juice at the store than those who were not.
Facebook thinks so, and it hopes Datalogix's data can prove it. Datalogix says it has sales metrics from more than 100 million U.S. households, 10 billion-plus individual transactions, and more than a trillion dollars' worth of purchases, all obtained by tracking customer loyalty cards issued by retailers.
If Facebook and Datalogix can statistically prove that impressions trump clicks, that will be the social network's ticket to monetizing on mobile platforms.
Facebook claims that in a trial study of 50 brands, the participating companiesall sellers of packaged goodssaw up to a 40 percent increase in ROI if they stopped repeating ads to the same users. Instead, they redistributed ads to appear to users who had seen them less often, distributing repeat impressions more equally.
In the long term, Facebook wants to provide data about the ideal number of impressions for an ad campaign, and it hopes to break the information down to specific campaign types. A new product or service will need more impressions to raise awareness than a well-established one, for example, and the number of impressions needed will likely change based on product type.
What does all this mean for small business owners? In the short term, not too much, since the data mining project is still in its infancy. In the long term, though, it could prove to be a treasure trove of data about ad targeting, especially for companies that sell products at retail.
Datalogix pulls in sales information from a staggering number of purchases. Assuming that Facebook launches the feature in full force down the line (and especially if it includes regional filters), that data should come in handy for fine-tuning your social ad strategyand deciding whether a is worth the cost of admission.
Thats assuming, of course, that Facebook's theory about the value of impressions holds true under scrutiny.