Facebook has established a global partnership with Omniture to create best-in-class solutions for measuring and optimizing Facebook campaigns. This guide is for online marketers who want to leverage the growing popularity and influence of Facebook to expand their customer base, increase revenue, and maximize return on investment for their ad spend. It provides an overview of the latest tools available for measuring and optimizing your marketing campaigns.

Created at Harvard University by Mark Zuckerberg and a small group of fellow computer science students, Facebook has “gone viral” as a social networking website since its introduction in 2006. It currently has more than 400 million active users worldwide (100 million of these in the United States). It is estimated that Facebook users spend a cumulative 8 billion minutes per day on the Facebook network.

Facebook demographics

According to recent surveys, 40% of active users in the United States are under 25 years old, and 23% are between 26 and 34, while those over 35 are the fastest growing demographic. The typical Facebook user is connected to 130 friends.

TechCrunch has recently reported data from comScore that Facebook web traffic is now nearing that of Yahoo!. It has already surpassed Yahoo! in monthly page views, and will soon overtake that search engine’s mark of more than 594 million unique visitors.

Of the 69% of online shoppers who regularly use social media sites, the overwhelming winner in terms of shopper presence is Facebook, with more than 50% of respondents saying that they use Facebook regularly.

Tapping into the enormous Facebook opportunity

Facebook ad spending in the United States went from $335 million in 2009 to $450 million in 2010 (a 34% increase). Facebook ad spending worldwide was even more impressive, going from $435 million in 2009 to $605 million in 2010 (up 39%). Non-U.S. ad spend went up from $100 million in 2009 to $155 million in 2010 (a 65% increase).

eMarketer predicts that in the United States overall online social network ad spend will increase in 2011 to $1.395 million—and this is just for paid advertising, which is a fraction of total spend.

Measuring ROI

Perhaps because of explosive growth, a lack of effective measurement tools, or both, fewer than one in five marketers say that they measure the ROI or business impacts of their social media investment. In fact, in a recent Forrester study, marketers admitted that they are not very good at measuring social media, rating their efforts at 4.5 out of 10.

Yet it is estimated that nearly 20% of marketing budgets will go to social networking sites in the next five years.6 By 2014, social media spending is expected to be $3.1 billion—over $1 billion more than email spending.

Capitalizing on the Facebook marketing opportunity

With 400 million worldwide users and 100 million users in the United States, Facebook clearly presents an amazing opportunity for online marketers, and it is only getting better with each passing month. Over 50% of the user base goes onto the site every day, and users spend over three times as much time on Facebook as they do on the next-most popular site.

But the popularity of Facebook presents marketers with some interesting challenges as well. Users spend more time engaging on social media sites than searching, so it is essential that marketers learn how to harness those connections to create a strong relationship with the right customers in their target markets.

Measure

How can you measure the impact of Facebook? Many companies have created Facebook pages and added a Connect button to their websites, but they need to know if this is growing their business. Here are some of the key questions to ask:

• How can I measure the value that Facebook ads are delivering?
• Is my online strategy working or not?
• Is my fan page successful?
• What is the ROI of tools like Connect and Open Graph?

Segment

Facebook provides opportunities to segment users, which no other site offers. Using Omniture tools, the site can determine your best customers and your best prospect targets. The site can help you determine who will generate the most ROI so that you can deliver the right message to the right audience.

• Who are my best customers?
• Which users should I be targeting?
• What is the message I should be delivering to each target audience?

Target

When you have identified your best customers and prospects, you can determine how best to target them, how much money to spend, and how to scale your ads to optimize Facebook marketing ROI.

• How do I get started?
• What should I pay?
• How do I reach my target audience?
• How do I fine-tune my online presence based on ad result metrics?
• How do I advertise at scale?

Optimize

Now that you have a method of measuring Facebook impacts and targeting your most promising customers and prospects, how do you continue to improve the process?

• What is the ROI on my Facebook ad spend?
• How does that compare to other channels (direct versus indirect)?
• What is the cross-channel attribution?
• What are the right investment choices to optimize ad results?

Key areas of Facebook measurement

There are four areas to measure marketing efforts on Facebook:

• Pages, including walls, info, and photos (standard and custom tabs)
• Applications (including standard applications like games)
• Connect and Open Graph, which allows Facebook members to log in to websites, mobile applications, and other third-party channels
• Ads, which appear on the right side of the Facebook page

Measuring Facebook with SiteCatalyst®

As a first step toward any successful Facebook campaign, you must know how visitors are using your Facebook page. SiteCatalyst breaks down your spending on Facebook and shows you where you’re generating the most users and the most revenue. The solution also tells you where users are going within your site and where they are going after they leave. You can see whether Facebook generates more site traffic than your other online channels, which helps you with allocation decisions for future Facebook spending.

Segment users with SiteCatalyst and Omniture Discover®

When you determine which parts of Facebook are generating the most revenue and ROI, you can use the demographic information that Facebook provides. The Facebook Open Graph API can give you data on gender, education level, relationship status, and location.

SiteCatalyst helps you dig deeper into the data, using age, gender, and other demographics to show you who logs in most and who connects most often to your site. Omniture Discover breaks this information down even further, showing which countries, towns, age groups, or relationships are generating the most users and revenue.

Omniture solutions, in combination with the Open Graph API, can arm you with exceptionally useful marketing data, helping you determine who your best customers are and providing an in-depth look at detailed demographic information that is tied to revenue and online traffic.

Create, manage, and target with Omniture SearchCenter® Plus

Omniture has worked with Facebook to create a simple, centralized place to create ads and manage ad spend on Facebook. Omniture SearchCenter Plus enables you to identify your most profitable customer groups, create targeted ads, and evaluate the results based on return on ad spend, number of clicks, and other meaningful metrics. As you compare the performance of your campaigns, you can easily make adjustments by redefining your audience and shifting budget dollars to maximize ROI.

Optimize cross channel with Omniture SearchCenter and SiteCatalyst

While Facebook is a great marketing channel, it isn’t the only one. SiteCatalyst offers multichannel reporting tools that show you how Facebook ranks against other online marketing channels, such as display ads, mobile and email advertising, and search engines.

Other functions

Omniture tools can dig deep into Facebook to answer all kinds of questions about your marketing programs. For instance, are people clicking on your fan pages or sharing content? What are they saying about your company?

To utilize these features, from the SiteCatalyst Admin Console, download App Measurement for Facebook. It includes all the instructions you need to measure the impact of your Facebook marketing tactics.

Conclusion Facebook is the most engaging site on the Web, and now marketers have the resources to create the most engaging online marketing experience.

Key takeaways:

• Facebook creates a great opportunity for online marketing professionals, but it presents some special challenges as well.
• Collecting accurate and meaningful metrics are essential if you are going to understand the value that your Facebook spend is delivering.
• Segmentation tools can tell you which demographic groups are most frequently interacting with your company.
• Visitor tracking can show you how users are interacting with your pages, applications, and ads so that you can track and target the right audience.
• Measuring Facebook impact as you target your most promising customers and prospects helps you optimize your online marketing results.
• Omniture SearchCenter Plus can help you compare your return on ad spend per campaign and by target audience to check whether your Facebook ad spend is appropriate for the business it generates.