Facebook Page Owners Getting More Stats

If you run a Facebook Page, you may be very interested in some new features that are rolling out for admins. Eric Eldon at Inside Facebook has discovered that some admins are starting to see impression counts for each post, as well as the number of likes and comments for each impression.

Eldon spoke with BrandGlue.com's Jeff Widman , who is one of the admins that has so far been able to access this information (doing work for a site called Mint.com), and he says he is able to check things like how much the news feed algorithm weights individual items versus the fan page itself. He also says Pages are seeing "many more" impressions than fans. Eldon writes (and shows screenshots):

With Mint's Page, for example, it has around 45,000 fans but a single post has more than 53,000 impressions. The 8,000 difference could be fans coming from the Page wall instead of their news feeds. But “it’s also a little uncertain where those 8,000 extra visits are coming from," Widman adds, "as the Insights package shows less than half the 8K page visits since that post appeared. Perhaps it’s counting each time someone sees the News Feed? So multiple Facebook visits in a single day appear as multiple impressions?"

Facebook Pages have become an increasingly great way for businesses and web sites to generate traffic as well as customer engagement. Facebook also recently launched it's answer to Twitter's retweet, which means that content pushed through pages have a much better shot at being shared more frequently throughout the social network (which is much larger than Twitter I might add).

In other Facebook news, the company is getting into customized data centers and is now letting application users get notifications through email. This means developers can seek out your email address on an opt-in basis (not much differently than a web site would do).
 

Have You Read This?

> Content Can Now Go Viral More Easily With Facebook

> Pingdom Names Facebook "Most Engaging Social Network"

> Facebook Gets Into Customized Data Centers

Google Obtains Access To TiVo Data

Google TV Ads is about to become a significantly more powerful marketing system.  A new pact with TiVo will allow Google to gather (and then pass on) very precise data about which commercials are being viewed, and even (to a lesser degree) who is doing the watching.

Mike Steib, Google's director of emerging platforms, explained the arrangement in a formal statement.  "This deal with TiVo will give advertisers access to even more anonymized viewership data, making Google's dataset one of the best in the industry," Steib said.  "Advertisers can use this data to understand which audiences and ads are most effective, which we think will ultimately lead to more relevant ads for viewers."

This development is likely to result in heavier use of Google TV Ads, too.  After all, the more data Google can provide, the less risky its program will seem, perhaps causing marketers to embrace it over alternatives or give TV ads a shot for the very first time.

What's a little harder to discern is how TiVo benefits from the arrangement.  Presumably Google paid more than a couple of dollars for access to TiVo users' data; all Todd Juenger, TiVo's vice president and general manager of audience research and measurement, would say is that this acts "to help the media industry better understand the effectiveness of ad campaigns in an evolving TV landscape."

Anyway, Google TV Ads is supposed to be able to reach 96 million households as things stand, and has served over 100 billion ad impressions to date.

Have You Read This?

> Google Gets A New Real-Time Infrastructure For Display Ads

> Google To Get More Interactive With Mobile Video Ads

> Google Ad Planner Gets Several New Enhancements

Advertisers Scammed By Invisible Impressions

There are sites out there that may be selling you ads that consumers aren't seeing. We're not talking about just a lack of traffic to the pages they appear on. There is a lack of traffic because the pages are simply invisible to viewers, making them essentially worthless.

A report from the Wall Street Journal says that even large corporations like Kraft foods, Greyhound Lines, and Capital One Financial are among the victims of such scams.

The sites use code, which makes it look to marketers like their ads have been appearing, but they do not appear to users. The report, based on research from Ben Edelman, cites MyToursInfo.com and MyProfilePimp.com as a couple of offending sites.

"The Web sites can get away with it, he says, because online advertisers don't always audit their campaigns for proof their ads are appearing," writes WSJ's Emily Steel. "It isn't clear how common these ads are or how much they cost marketers."

So how is an advertiser to know who to trust? One solution mentioned in the report is to buy ads based on attaining a certain number of clicks as well as impressions. In such a scenario, a site would have no benefit to pull off such a scam. Another possible solution is to be more directly involved with who you are advertising with.

"Advertisers often buy display ads based on the number of times they are loaded onto a page, rather than the number of clicks they get," says Steel. "Over the past, year, an increasing number of scams have sought to take advantage of that pricing system as advertisers have started buying more of their online ads via middlemen called ad networks, instead of directly from the Web sites themselves. These networks sell ad space at cheap rates across thousands of sites, and they don't always weed out illegitimate players."

Online advertising is having a big year. A number of recent reports show an optimistic viewpoint for the industry. There is no reason why that shouldn't continue as long as advertisers take responsibility for monitoring and stay involved with their campaigns.

Yahoo Launches New Ad Unit with Charity Contest

Yahoo is launching a new Yahoo Mail ad unit called "Tandem," to be reserved for "the most creative" non-profit campaign. The company has partnered with the Ad Council to launch the initiative, which it refers to as "Create for a Cause."

  Features of the ad unit include synched animation, floating rich media, and streaming video. Yahoo says the objective of the contest is to determine which campaign most creatively and effectively uses the Tandem capabilities.

It's a contest in which advertising agencies can submit their non-profit digital campaigns for a chance to appear in 74 million impressions on Yahoo. In addition, the winner can be among the first to try Yahoo's new custom ad unit integration on Yahoo! Mail, and reach 32 million daily users.

"Agencies are doing an unbelievable job of building smart campaigns for good causes and helping non-profits break into digital in meaningful ways," said Beth Lawrence, vice president of agency development at Yahoo!. "This contest with the Ad Council provides a fun and creative way for agencies to showcase their creative genius, get some recognition for their favorite non-profits and drum up interest and visibility for an important cause. We are thrilled to be a part of this contest and part of the digital revolution for every kind of campaign."

Any advertiser that currently has a digital campaign with the Ad Council is eligible to apply, but advertisers are also encouraged to create new campaigns. The winning entry will be announced November 4th and run on November 18th. The deadline for submission is October 23rd. Submissions can be made at advertising.yahoo.com/createforacause.

Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB, Nancy Hill, President and CEO of AAAA, Allison Arden, Publisher of Advertising Age and Creativity Magazine, Peggy Conlin, President/CEO of the Ad Council and others make up the committee that will judge the campaigns.

Yahoo wins from the contest by getting to show off its new ad unit to a lot of people, but the best part is that no matter who officially wins the contest, the ad will (presumably) be aimed at a good cause and create massive exposure for it.

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