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As one of Facebook’s measurement partners, recently announced at its 2016 Global Partner Summit for marketers, we have been tasked with providing a holistic view of ad campaigns for its advertisers. By linking together the ad contacts from Facebook’s platform and our own media panel, Facebook’s advertisers can see a clearer picture of device usage, media exposure such as TV and even grocery shopping touchpoints. Not only are we able to measure the sales uplifts of the ad campaign, but advertisers gain a deeper understanding of the effects and exposure of any type of media and the related purchase journey.
A complete record of media exposure and purchasing
What “Data Link” does, is to connect two sets of data: Advertising exposures on the Facebook platform, regardless of mobile, tablet or desktop, and single-source data from our GfK Cross Media Link Panel, which we run in several countries around the world.
Typically, the GfK Crossmedia Link is comprised of individuals who have consented to having a meter track their TV viewing, and a passive meter tracks their browsing habits on home computers. Finally, they also scan the contents of their grocery baskets when they bring them home, giving us a complete view of TV and digital media exposure and grocery shopping.
With Data Link, we can combine Facebook ad impressions with our other panel data to arrive at a complete record of media exposure and purchasing. Other digital publishers are tracked using view-tags to track exposure, while print exposure can be estimated using a survey approach.
Understanding campaign efficacy and efficiency
This single-source approach means that we are able to detect and measure the sales uplifts caused by various elements of a campaign, and disentangle them from the effects of promotions, loyalty and price.
The marginal effects of TV, Facebook and other factors such as price, promotions and loyalty are estimated using a logistic regression model that gives the sales uplift caused by each channel. Through this approach, it is then trivial to arrive at a figure for incremental revenue and return on ad-spend caused by each channel.
By including interaction effects in the model, we can also investigate the synergy effects between different media, or look at effects by frequency of exposure.
These measurement products referred to as CPA (Campaign Performance Analysis) and MME (Marketing Mix Evaluator) are now largely used by a growing number of advertisers who are able to understand precisely the efficiency and effectiveness of their campaigns on Facebook and across media.
A Facebook research partner
Five years ago, Facebook started to host yearly partner events for its “Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers” (PMD). The PMD program was created to help businesses scale their marketing efforts on Facebook and was renamed FMP (Facebook Marketing Partner) in 2015 with a number of additional features available to make it easier for marketers to find partners based on their specific needs.
Now in 2016, the Global Partner Summit has become the largest Global Facebook event where Facebook invites all of its marketing partners. And, I was in San Francisco yesterday celebrating the future of marketing together with hundreds of partners. It was truly exciting to be there in the middle of it all.
We have worked with Facebook as a measurement partner for several years:
This work for Facebook and its advertising clients has resulted in us being named at the 2016 Facebook Global Partner Summit as one of a select few research partners. As of today, we are listed on Facebook Marketing Partner Website in the newly launched “Measurement Partner” category.
As team GfK, we are honoured and happy for this formal recognition of our work.
Please email sabra.mieli@gfk.com to share your thoughts.