Facebook is stepping up efforts to woo Australian brands. It's slimmed down its product range and is heading for the direct response market. Now it's telling some of the biggest brands in Australia how it can track the user and their intent – and it is bringing some of its global technology partners to the region. It's all about the path to conversion.
Last week Facebook convened meetings Sydney and Melbourne attended by some of the biggest names in the finance, retail and automotive sectors. Now advertisers know how the technology works and have a better grasp of the ad solutions that Facebook has chopped down. They also have a firmer idea of the power of social and search, which seem to be heading for convergence. They also met one of Facebook's technology partners which understands how to track, measure and bid better than most.
Now Facebook is bringing those tech partners to Australia in a bid to take a bigger bite out of brand ad budget.
In recent weeks some big companies have had a pop at Facebook. Westfield marketing boss John Batistich said it hadn't worked for the company compared to traditional channels. Kellogg's John Broome told AdNews the company needed to show its roadmap. Hungry Jack's senior marketers said its measurement could be hit and miss.
In response, Facebook told AdNews that it would shortly make the platform "even easier for marketers to plan, target, advertise, and measure. And easier to compare their efforts on Facebook to those in other media channels, across platforms".
Facebook is bringing in its partners to make that happen. One of which is Kenshoo, which is now hiring locally.
Director of strategic global accounts Patience Yi told AdNews that the company would be delivering the algorithmic, automation and optimisation tools that brands were asking for. Kenshoo, which gets early access to new Facebook products, also "acts as a buffer between Facebook and marketers" to help them understand how to use those tools, she said.
"We understand some of the commentary in the market about ROI concerns on Facebook. But we would encourage them to create a custom strategy depending on their goals."
She said it was "tough to measure the true value of social marketing because of the old-style siloed approach". And, because up until recently "Facebook had not had its own conversion pixel". That meant if advertisers were not using a preferred marketing developer (Kenshoo is one of 14 globally) "it has been really tough for clients to measure true value".
Now it does, and along with new products such as Facebook Custom Audiences, solves the tracking and conversion issue – and takes Facebook into direct response. And that's where it gets interesting for brands, she said.
"Facebook never came to the market saying, 'We are the bottom of the marketing funnel.' That has changed with products such as Custom Audiences, which enables advertisers to target their ads to a targeted set of users with whom they have already established a relationship on or off Facebook or have shown explicit interest in their product. With these re-targeting tools brands can use Facebook's social ads as a direct response play."
Australia was a key market for Kenshoo and Facebook, said Yi. "We see in Australia that many big brands across retail, travel, telecoms and automotive are spending significant sums on Facebook advertising. They want to scale up activity while keeping costs down."
She said that's where Kenshoo came in – acting as a "buffer". "We help [advertisers] with re-targeting, tracking the conversion and the revenue performance of organic posts."
Yi explained that the company also managed real-time bidding for social ads, meaning that brands optimised their spend and shifted dollars into the best performing ads – without bidding too high in the Facebook Exchange.
Something else that advertisers might be interested in was tracking of customers through apps, said Yi. She said that Kenshoo was the "only company in Australia" with a mobile app product that "enables marketers to track the cost per install and measure the events that take place after the install, such as revenue and conversions".
But fundamentally, she said marketers needed to stop comparing search to social and measuring the last click. They should combine the channels and optimise attribution "or they just won't get the full picture".
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