As marketers look to build digital campaigns to connect with and influence consumers, many are asking how best to measure success and optimize the impact of their ad campaigns. Since the early days of digital advertising, online marketing has been focused on optimizing ad campaigns for the click. But while clicks are an effective way to measure campaigns designed to drive traffic and fulfill direct response goals, increasingly, research from firms like Nielsen suggest that clicks aren’t the right metric for the broader set of marketing objectives beyond direct response.

So how can marketers with goals like driving in-store purchase or branding objectives – those similar to TV – build and measure their campaigns? Today at IAB MIXX, Brad Smallwood, Facebook’s Head of Measurement and Insights, discussed findings from a study conducted in partnership with Datalogix–using a new tool that connects ad exposure (seeing a brand’s ad) on Facebook with in-store purchases (buying the brand’s product). This tool enables marketers who have offline sales objectives to measure and optimize their digital campaigns, and this research represents a first look at the key conclusions from a study of nearly 50 digital campaigns.

• Impressions create value. 99 percent of sales generated from online branding ad campaigns were from people that saw, but did not interact with, ads— proof that it is the delivery of the marketing message to the right consumer, not the click, that creates real value for brand advertisers.
• Reach drives revenue for online brand marketers. This is a concept very familiar to TV marketers, who often start with a reach objective—but until now hadn’t been proven for online. When applied to digital brand campaigns, the study demonstrated that campaigns that maximized reach had on average a 70 percent higher return-on-investment.
• Finding the right message frequency is key. The study revealed that for online brand campaigns, if you reallocated high frequency impressions to people seeing too few impressions, you would see a 40 percent increase in ROI with the same budget. What this means is that for every online campaign there is a “sweetspot” of effective frequency that maximizes return on investment, and that the DataLogix tool can help marketers empirically isolate that sweetspot for each brand and campaign.

Read the full post at Facebook Studio.