#convertro

New Post has been published on http://www.learn-digital-marketing.com/social-media-myth-busters-aol-and-converto-separate-advertising-fact-from-fiction/

Social Media Myth Busters: AOL and Converto Separate Advertising Fact from Fiction

Do ads on social Web sites work? That’s what AOL wanted to know. (And don’t we all?)

“It’s a question many have been trying to answer over the past several years, while the social media advertising industry continues to grow at an impressive clip,” said AOL in a blog about its recent study. “eMarketer estimates that spending on social media ads will hit $6.6 billion in the US this year, growing more than 46 percent from 2013.”

AOL acknowledged that there’s no dearth of consumer studies on the topic, not a few of which suggest that social advertising does not work. So the company conducted its own, dubbed “Myth-Busting Social Media Advertising.”

“But, what people say and what they actually do are very different,” noted AOL.

AOL used multi-touch attribution tech from Converto to try to “separate the facts from fiction.” Convertro, a leading attribution provider utilizes software which scientifically determines which media exposures influence a purchase and by how much. That kind of data is exactly what brands need to optimize media spend across advertising channels — not only social media, but all channels.

“Using this technology, we analyzed hundreds of millions of consumer interactions and across Convertro’s client base to uncover how social channels influenced sales conversions and to what extent,” explained AOL.

What was learned? For one thing, brands using Convertro saw around a 25 percent boost in conversions with paid social ads versus organic social content.

YouTube stood out in Convertro and AOL’s research as the most likely social media property by far to turn a prospect immediately into a customer—likely because video content like that hosted on YouTube can provide 100 percent of the information an online consumer requires to make a confident purchase decision.

Other notable findings:

1. SOCIAL MEDIA WORKS FOR BRANDS. Social provides significant impact on a customer’s path to purchase and strongly influences their buying decisions. 2. PAID SOCIAL PERFORMS. Paid social media advertising transforms the medium from an influencer tool into an effective upper and lower funnel solution that directly moves the needle on sales. 3. PAID ADVERTISING PERFORMANCE DIFFERS ON EACH SOCIAL NETWORK. Some social networks are more conducive to awareness vs. conversions. 4. THE VALUE OF SOCIAL DEPENDS ON PRODUCT VERTICAL. Social performance is not ubiquitous across all advertiser verticals—it varies by channel and product category.

Convertro (a division of Aol Platforms) released a survey recently on the effectiveness of advertising on social networks. The approach was to We break out the different phases  in the path to purchase to show how different social networks performed at different points.; from first exposure to a brand, through to the final online message that seals the deal. They also accounted for a singular exposures to brands that led to a conversion. They found that YouTube led the way in making initial introductions and driving final sales. You can download the report for yourself. Here’s what some of their findings looked like.

I interviewed Convertro’s Jeff Zwelling for the Sunday Business Post about the survey. I wasn’t convinced of the value of this approach, so I asked him whether the focus on percentages rather than absolute values of conversions for each network gives the sense that all networks are equal, and whether it would have have been more instructive to give numbers rather than percentages? Here’s what he said:

I actually disagree with the latter point. The goal of the report is to provide qualitative guidance to marketers on what we’re seeing in terms of how social channels affect the purchase funnel that consumers go through. Using absolute numbers would provide a look at which channels saw the most activity across touch points, which would obviously skew towards more populated services such as Facebook and Twitter. As a marketer, you’re really interested in the former to understand how your social ad investments can go further.