Facebook must improve its measurement metrics to prove to advertisers why they should continue to invest marketing budgets in the platform, according to Hungry Jack's top marketers.
Paul Tredinnick, national marketing manager at the fast food chain and Andrew McCallum, strategic planning director, told AdNews their concerns over the social network’s lack of effective advertising measurement at GroupM's mLab event yesterday. Facebook, Google, Mi9, Spotify and others are showing marketers their future and current technology at the event.
Facebook outlined its upcoming Graph Search and Facebook Home innovations, but was unable to say when the new features would be rolling out to the Australian market. Facebook APAC product marketer at Facebook, Christina Mikhail, did say though that “the bulk of Australian marketers” were yet to use the platform.
Tredinnick told AdNews: “The challenge with all the new technology stuff … is actually how do we as advertisers and marketers use that. There are brilliant ideas, like with Google Glass, you go ‘wow’ but how do we effectively advertise within that market? Even with the likes of Facebook and Spotify – how are we going to advertise effectively within that? That’s the first part [of the challenge]. The second part is how are we going to measure it.”
Getting accurate measurements for investments in Facebook activity is proving difficult for the brand which invests a “significant portion” of its budget in the social network and works with it to trial new features and ad products.
Tredinnick said: “They’re creating great technologies, but if they want [advertisers] to spend money on it [they need to] make sure they’ve got the metrics and measurement right or advertisers will say ‘no, we're not convinced it’s stable enough’ and they’ll go to what’s familiar to them.”
Despite its concerns, Hungry Jack's buys Facebook advertising and believes it is a “powerful medium” for advertisers.
“I think we’re pushing the boundaries with Facebook advertising in Australia but [while] Facebook has spent a lot of time on its tech it hasn’t got sharp enough on its measurements. So we’re holding back a little bit,” said Tredinnick.
Hungry Jack's trialled Facebook’s Beta Offers product, which offers coupons via the Facebook Newsfeed and encourages users to share the coupons when they are redeemed, but with poor results.
"We trialled beta offers but it basically didn’t work and they couldn’t work out why. More mainstream advertising channels have got used to how to sell their media – these guys [Facebook] haven’t worked out how to sell their media yet. But that’s where they are still growing.”
Yet despite not being able to fully measure and report on Facebook advertising activity, Hungry Jack's is adamant it is worth marketing dollars because “when it works, it works great.”
Facebook has long come under fire from brands for not doing enough to measure ROI. Earlier this year it acquired Atlas from Microsoft in an effort to bolster its capabilities and “help advertisers to see a more complete view of the effectiveness of their campaigns.”
This year it has streamlined its ad types in a bid to make it simpler for advertisers and is stepping up efforts to show its role in attribution.
Recent research has suggested that the platform is up to 30% undervalued under last click attribution models.
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