Facebook has teamed up with Tesco’s data business dunnhumby to tie ads on the social network in with off-line sales.
The move could help deliver greater understanding of the effectiveness of brands’ spending in social media.
The deal syncs up Dunnhumby data on 17m UK shoppers with Facebook’s 37m monthly users and lets brands to assess the impact of different ad creative and frequency via a straightforward methodology that sees one group of Facebook users exposed to an ad while a control group is not.
Brands will also be able to use the solution to understand how different types of audiences respond to certain ads, how differing creative or ad products perform, and the ideal frequency of ads to be show to certain audiences.
Alex North, head of partnerships at Facebook in EMEA, said the deal will “help advertisers understand the true business of advertising on Facebook in a granular, anonymised and secure way.
“One of the key benefits is that the solution will help advertisers understand their Facebook campaign metrics – what is working and what is working less well – and optimise those campaigns based on an objective understanding of whether their campaigns are driving sales.”
In trials with FMCG brands, Dunnhumby reported that one advertiser tested six different creative executions with the winning version producing a 10% sales uplift.
Another explored frequency, serving one ad per week to one group, two ads per week to another, and found that exposing users to more ads resulted in a 6%-7% uplift in sales.
Adam Smith, dunnhumby’s Head of Media Strategy, added: “This is a crucial partnership for marketing measurement, because advertisers are asking for robust learnings on how digital investment is impacting actual sales to help inform budget optimization across channels.
“The scale of the dunnhumby and Facebook datasets means that we can offer, and have already seen, detailed insight on the performance of campaigns on Facebook. We’re looking forward to using the Sales Impact solution to help a range of advertisers and building on our learnings to date.”