Brand.net Launches Digital Media’s First Social Media Measurement Suite for Brand Advertisers

by Cindy Cattey
November 8th, 2011

Brand.net today announced the launch of its Social Media Measurement Suite, the first turnkey media and measurement solution designed to give brand advertisers insight into the impact of their cross-format digital media campaigns on their social media presence and perceptions. Social Attitude™ and SocialLink™ provide integrated insights on the impact of display, video and social media on users’ brand perceptions on Facebook and other social activity.

“Our brand advertisers have told us that it is critical, but extremely difficult, to measure the impact of their digital media campaigns on their social media presence,” said Elizabeth Blair, CEO of Brand.net. “Previously, they challenged us to measure media’s impact on offline sales and we developed SalesLink®, the first and per Nielsen the most-used web-wide offline sales media and measurement solution. Our customers asked us to turn our innovation to their latest challenge, social media measurement, and today we are excited to launch for them the first two products in our Social Media Measurement Suite, Social Attitude and SocialLink.”

• Social Attitude taps into the expansive demos of the Facebook community to provide brand advertisers with understanding of the attitudinal impact of their web-wide digital campaigns. Powered by Nielsen Online Brand Effect, an ad effectiveness measurement service that provides performance metrics and qualitative insights into the impact of online ads running anywhere on the web, Social Attitude delivers rapid and detailed insight into brand KPIs through Nielsen’s polling of exposed audiences on their Facebook homepages.

“Nielsen understands how critical social measurement is to brand advertisers and, in our view, the most important thing is to have a multi-faceted understanding of audiences, including reach and frequency metrics, as well as how they interact with brands,” said Scott McKinley, EVP Ad Effectiveness at Nielsen. “That’s why we’re excited to work with Brand.net to give their clients insight into the impact of their digital campaigns – no matter how big or small – drawn from our measurement of Facebook’s expansive community of representative and highly engaged users.”

• SocialLink provides detailed insights into the impact of a brand’s digital campaign on its own Facebook presence, including Facebook fan page visitation and related search activity. SocialLink ties into comScore’s extensive brand tracking on Facebook, mapping broad-reach online campaigns to both Facebook and brand micro-site engagement. For the first time, brands can learn how their paid campaigns drive audience behavior and interactivity across owned and earned channels at the same time.

Rounding out its Social Media Measurement Suite, Brand.net also integrates comScore’s Social Essentials into its upfront partnerships. With Social Essentials, Brand.net provides detailed behavioral insights and data on the size, frequency and demographic composition of a brand’s Facebook following.

“Our advertisers asked for social media measurement that more closely ties impact to campaign and we have responded with a trifecta: proven Nielsen and comScore research capabilities, the power of the Facebook community, and the quality and scale of Brand.net media, powered by our pioneering MFP platform,” said Blair.

 

Online Brand Advertising’s 654% ROI

by Cindy Cattey
October 7th, 2011

A picture is worth a thousand words. Here is the lead graphic in Nielsen’s latest whitepaper:

Nielsen’s conclusion: “The random scatter of the points indicates a lack of relationship between sales lift and click-through rate.” In plain English: click-throughs have no relationship to product sales. For many years, Nielsen has provided statistically significant confirmation of this fact. We know that brands don’t advertise for fun, they advertise to generate high volume, high ROI sales. We know clicks don’t work. What does?

In September, Nielsen released the SalesLink® study results from a 1H 2011 Brand.net campaign that used panel-based measurement to quantify the campaign’s direct impact on offline sales. What did the study cover?

The advertiser: one of the five biggest CPGs in the world
The product: a new hair-care solution targeted at women 25-54
The goal: driving awareness and trial
The campaign: over 3 months reached over 16 million households, totaling 33.6 GRPs
Nielsen’s conclusion: The campaign drove over $1.7 million in incremental retail sales and achieved a 654% ROI on media investment

What drove this result?

- Audience. The campaign had high composition and high reach against the target audience. 66% of total impressions reached women, and 58% of total impressions reached women ages 25-54. The campaign exceeded its guaranteed impression delivery (100MM) and, most importantly, unique reach to target (W25-54) (30MM) goals.
- Optimization. Across dozens of SalesLink® studies, we have confirmed that campaign-wide frequency management is one of the three key levers in maximizing ROI. Not per day, per month, per ad size or per creative – any of those methods generates significant waste and materially diminishes ROI – but frequency against the target unique user on every impression at any point in time. The campaign-wide frequency for this campaign was 3.3.
- Environment. The campaign was contextually aligned to maximize relevance to the target audience (e.g. fashion, shopping, entertainment, casual games), and every page was screened for quality prior to an advertisement being served.

The conclusion: driving offline sales requires optimization of multiple brand metrics. Analogizing to sports, it is not a one-event competition; it is a triatholon. And the best-known online metric of all – CTR – is not even one of the events. The advertiser who competes successfully on all three – Audience, Optimization and Environment – is the winner. As shown above, that victory produced a 654% ROI for this advertiser.