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.