In recent months, we've been gathering feedback about our Page Insights tool. What we heard is that we need to make Page Insights more actionable. It should be clearer to businesses how to use this information to drive the results they care about.
Starting today, we're rolling out updates to the Page Insights tool and inviting a select group of Page admins to participate in this preview. These global changes include improvements to the way we organize and report fundamental metrics:
Making our metrics clear and simple
People Talking About This (PTAT)
We heard from many Page admins that they want more insight into the actions that make up PTAT. For instance, how people's liking their business Page differs from people's interacting with their posts. For this reason, we're breaking out PTAT into elements that will now be reported separately as Page Likes, People Engaged (the number of unique people who have clicked on, liked, commented on, or shared your posts), Page tags and mentions, Page checkins, and other interactions on a Page. PTAT as a combined metric will still be available for Page admins not participating in the new Insights preview.
Virality
We also heard that the virality metric in Page Insights is often used as a benchmark for Page post quality. However, this metric doesn't include clicks in its measurement, which are a strong indicator of positive post engagement and a key piece in providing marketers with metrics around overall post quality. So moving forward, we're including clicks in this metric and renaming ‘virality’ to ‘engagement rate’ to be clearer in our definition.
Helping marketers create and publish better content
Facebook News Feed rewards quality posts with greater reach. One major consideration in gauging post quality is the relationship between positive interactions (likes, comments, shares and clicks) and negative interactions (hide post, hide all posts, report as spam, unlike page). Historically, Page Insights has reported on posts' performance, reach, and engagement in three distinct places. In the new Page Insights, we aggregate all these metrics into a post-specific score card, so marketers can evaluate positive and negative metrics together. This will help Page admins better identify content people interact with, produce more of it, and enjoy increased reach and impact on Facebook.
Providing more insights about the people that interact with your Page content
Before, Page Insights showed you the demographic breakdown (age, gender, country, city and language) of who you reached. Now, updated Page insights allows you to see not only who you’ve reached – but also who you’ve engaged. This helps Page admins identify what content is resonating with what audiences, to better inform their Page content and strategy.
Starting today, we will gradually roll out these updates. Page admins who are invited to use the new Page Insights will be notified within the Insights tool interface. The existing Page Insights will still be available for all other Page admins until later this summer, at which point we'll make the updates to Page Insights available to all marketers. At this time, we will not make changes to the Page Insights export or API.
Inline with our effort to simplify our ad products and align more closely with marketers’ business objectives, today we’re announcing improvements to Page post link ads.
Facebook Page post link ads are optimized to drive off-site conversions and sales. Over the past several months, aligned with updates to News Feed, we’ve enlarged images and the clickable area for Page post link ads on both desktop and mobile. These enhancements help advertisers better showcase their products and services. Since these updates, Nanigans, a Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer, has seen Page post link ads in News Feed drive better performance their clients who are driving off-site conversions and sales.* This is why we’re continuing to update the Page post link ad unit, and encouraging marketers to use it to meet their direct-response objectives.
Updates we're announcing today include:
Customizable images
Choosing the right image is essential to creating a great ad, so we’re are rolling out image customization for Page post link ads across all of our interfaces, which means more flexibility for advertisers in choosing their creative. With this feature, advertisers can upload any image they believe will drive the most conversions to their website (rather than Facebook’s automatically sourcing a thumbnail image based on images on the linked site). Image customization is now available via the Page composer, create flow, Power Editor and the API.
Simplified flow for unpublished Page post link ads
Unpublished Page post ads allow marketers to tailor the right messages to specific groups of people, rather than having a Page post appear to everyone who likes their Page. We heard that marketers want the ability to create these type of ads in a more self-service way, so now they can easily create a new unpublished Page post link ad directly in the ad create flow, instead of having to select an existing post to promote.
Redesigned ad create flow to drive optimal ad choices
We know Page post link ads in News Feed can outperform domain ads on the right-hand side, and we want to encourage marketers to take advantage of this enhanced performance for off-site conversions. So now when a marketer enters an offsite link as the ad destination, rather than defaulting to a right-hand side format, we’ll automatically allow advertisers to choose a domain ad for the right-hand column and/or an unpublished Page post link ad for News Feed. This removes the guesswork when transitioning from advertising on the right-hand side to advertising in News Feed.
We think these updates will make it easier for advertisers to reach the right people with the right message and drive the results they care most about.
*Nanigans’ data shows that Page post link ads in News Feed delivered an ROI of 53 percent over a seven-day period, while Page post photo ads with a shortened URL linking offsite delivered an ROI of 24 percent. Although Page post link ads drove better results than photo posts, both Page post link ads and Page post photo ads outperformed domain ads on the right-hand side. Nanigans’ data spans 150 million impressions across multiple verticals.
The 60th annual Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity kicks off next week, and we’re looking forward to seeing everyone. Please join us for these events and follow the #facebookcannes hashtag on Facebook and Instagram for photos and updates.
Cannes Seminar: Creativity at Scale
Date: Tuesday, June 18
Time: 2pm–2:45pm
Location: Grand Audi Theater
Anyone with a badge can attend.
Sixty years after the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity began, what makes a big idea? Which mediums and platforms are really changing the world and what makes the companies who are building them different? Join Facebook's Head Creative Mark D'Arcy, Droga 5's founder and Chairman David Droga, and Facebook's Director of Engineering Andrew "Boz" Bosworth in a panel moderated by Pattie Sellers from Fortune magazine as they discuss how Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue value and view creativity and what they can learn from each other.
Cannes Connect Happy Hour, Sponsored by Facebook
Date: Wednesday, June 19
Time: 5:30pm–7:00pm
Anyone with a delegate badge can attend.
Every day, more than 4.75 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook.* In many cases, these conversations are about brands, products, public figures and local businesses. Today, we launched
hashtags as a way for people and businesses to discover and engage in these conversations.
Hashtags are now available to a small percentage of people and Pages on Facebook, and we will roll them out more broadly in the coming weeks.
Here is what marketers need to know:
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If you are already using hashtags in an advertising campaign through other channels, you can amplify these campaigns by including your hashtags in Facebook advertising. The same creative best practices on Facebook still apply – compelling copy and photography that is in the brand voice works best.
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Any hashtags that you use on other platforms that are connected to your Facebook Page will be automatically clickable and searchable on Facebook.
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Like other Facebook marketing tools, hashtags allow you to join and drive the conversations happening about your business. We recommend you search for and view real-time public conversations and test strategies to drive those conversations using hashtags.
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Hashtags do not impact your distribution or engagement in News Feed on either desktop or mobile. We recommend you continue to focus on your existing campaigns to drive your most important business objectives.
Hashtags are a first step in surfacing relevant and important public conversations. Over time our goal is to build out additional functionality for marketers including trending hashtags and new insights so that you can better understand how hashtags fit into your overall Facebook advertising strategies and drive your business objectives.
*Facebook internal data, May 2013.
Over the past year, we have been gathering feedback from marketers about our ads products. One point we heard loud and clear is that we need to simplify our product offering. As the services we provide to marketers have grown, so have our new products; while each product may be good on its own, we realized that many of them accomplish the same goals.
So today we are pleased to announce an ongoing effort to simplify our offerings. When we work with a marketer, we always start with their business goals, and we are going to do the same thing with our ad products. Our vision is that over time, an advertiser can come to Facebook and tell us what they are trying to achieve, and our ads tools will automatically suggest the right combination of products to help them achieve it.
In the next six months, we plan to streamline the number of ad units from 27 to fewer than half of that while mapping all of our ads to the business objectives marketers care about — be it in-store sales, online conversions, app installs, etc. We have a few ways to accomplish this goal:
Eliminate redundancies. We noticed that many ad units accomplish the same goals, so we’re cutting out these redundancies. This includes removing the Questions product for Pages because marketers can simply ask a question in a post and get answers in comments.
It also means removing the online Offer product because marketers have found that using a Page post link ad is a more effective way to drive people to deals on their websites. We're going to start making these changes in July.
Include the best of sponsored stories in all ads. Previously, to get the best social context available, advertisers had to purchase sponsored stories in addition to ads. In the future, for example, when you create a Page post photo ad, we will automatically add social context to boost performance and eliminate the extra step of creating sponsored stories. We know social enhances ad resonance; people are influenced by this type of word-of-mouth marketing. Research from Nielsen, comScore, and Datalogix shows that social context can drive awareness and return on ad spend, so we want to make it easier to add it to our ads. These changes will happen in the fall.
Make ad units look more consistent. We want to have a more consistent visual display of our ads across all marketer objectives and Facebook placements. This will reduce the number of ad formats and make the ad creation process much simpler for advertisers who run multiple campaigns or want to test which ad creative performs the best. We think this will ultimately help advertisers optimize their campaigns across desktop and mobile. A consistent look and feel to our ads will also be a better overall experience for people on Facebook. These changes will start happening in late June.
In the coming weeks and months, marketers will start to see these streamlined changes to our ads solutions. We think these updates will make it easier for them to do what they do best: reach the right groups of people with the right message and drive the results they care most about.
To make it easier for people to find the authentic presence of the person or Page they are looking for, we're rolling out verified Pages to both desktop and mobile web. We think this will create a better user experience and help increase authentic engagement on Facebook, specifically with celebrities, journalists, government officials, and popular brands and businesses.
Verification badges will appear in a number of places:
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Next to the name of the Page
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When hovering over the name of a Page
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In Graph Search queries
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In stories about people liking a Page
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In News Feed ads for your Page
There is no action required for Page admins to add a verification badge. In the coming days, we will automatically verify the largest Pages on Facebook that are at the greatest risk of duplication. At this time we cannot accept verification requests for all Pages. If your Page is not automatically verified, please visit the
Help Center to see how to resolve common duplication issues.
What's new with Facebook Exchange? Find out how marketers are having success with one of the largest real-time bidded ad exchanges. Learn how desktop link Page Post Ads in FBX can further leverage the power of News Feed to drive your direct response goals.
Guest Speaker: Scott Shapiro, Product Marketing
When: Thursday, May 30th
The two live broadcasts will contain the same content, so please choose the one most convenient for your schedule.
The discussion will be followed by a live Q&A with questions from our online audience. Please share the event with your friends and colleagues and post questions in advance on the event wall.
After a successful alpha with Nanigans, Mediamath, and Tellapart, desktop Page Post Link Ads are moving into beta on Facebook Exchange (FBX)—a solution for direct response campaigns where the targeting, conversion objective and measurement are outside of Facebook.
Starting today, additional businesses via Qualified DSPs can scale their FBX efforts from the Right Hand Side to the most engaging place on Facebook: News Feed. All Qualified DSPs received beta access and now have the opportunity to begin implementing desktop Page Post Link Ads.
In this beta, DSPs can implement all types of campaigns, including those with product-specific creative, by creating Unpublished Page Posts and selecting the right one for the right user at the right time. We are working on integrating
FBX realtime dynamic creative functionality (highly-customized and/or optimized ad creatives that allow on-the-fly creative modification) for the Link Page Post Ad Format.
For a list of Qualified DSPs, visit
www.facebook-pmdcenter.com/fbx. For more information on how to prepare for desktop Page post link ads in FBX, reach out to your Facebook account team.
Today we're announcing the global rollout of Promoted Page Likes, an easier way for Page owners to run ads that promote their Pages. First made available to U.S. businesses in December, Promoted Page Likes allow Page owners to create ads aimed at gaining new fans directly from their Page.
Promoted Page Like ads can run on both the mobile and desktop News Feed. Getting started is easy: simply click the Promoted Page Likes panel in the Page admin view and select your budget. You can target your audience by selecting a location.
In late March, members of Facebook's Creative Council gathered in New York to review hundreds of campaigns submitted for the second annual Facebook Studio Awards. Serving as the jury, they debated work submitted by brands and agencies from 59 countries around the world to decide this year's winners. Take a look at the winning work here.
This year, there was a noticeable shift from application development to a focus on content that tells a story in the News Feed through compelling copywriting and photography:
"Every day we work with brand and agency partners to help them understand the benefits of Facebook and leverage its creative canvas and unmatched scale. Last year, brands tried to push the technical limits of Facebook, and digital platforms overall. Now, in just one year’s time, we were pleased with the renewed focus on the craft of great storytelling through publishing.” – Mark D’Arcy, Head of Global Creative Solutions, Facebook
The Oreo Daily Twist campaign mastered that approach and the jury selected it for the Blue Award. To celebrate the brand's 100th anniversary, Oreo used Facebook to create 100 Page Post ads in 100 days. The ads were beautifully designed, timely and relevant, referencing current events from around the world, such as the Olympics and Mars Rover Landing.
According to D’Arcy:
"Oreo, 360i and Draftfcb were successful because they had an approach that used creative talent designed around a marketing structure to keep pace with, listen to and connect with people. The structure is like a current-day version of a newsroom environment and people love it—and the numbers prove its success.”
Congratulations to the agencies and brands behind this year’s outstanding work. See you next year!
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