Facebook Advertising Works According Nielsen Study

According to the first public Facebook user study done by Nielsen, Facebook Advertising works.  Nielsen studied more than 800,000 Facebook users as well as advertising campaigns from 14 different brands in several categories. Acccording to the study those Facebook Ads which included mentions from friends who were already fans of the advertised products saw an increase in product recall of 16 %. The increase was 30 % when the ads coincided with a similar mention in the users’ News Feeds.

Image - Courtesy of the Facebook Advertising Guide ISBN 978-0-9806484-7-8

The study showed a notable increase in awareness, ad recall and purchasing intent when the Facebook Ads mentioned friends of those users who have become fans of the brand in the ad. This is actually no surprise as it has been a known fact that online (or off line) peer recommendations are one of the most influential factors in brand acceptance. If a Facebook Ad coincides with an item in a user’s News Feed (for instance indicating that a friend has become a fan of a brand, artists, product etc.) the impact of the ad on awareness and recall is even more evident.

Facebook Ads on average generated 10 % increase in ad recall, 4 % increase in brand awareness and 2 % increase in purchase behavour among users who saw the ads compared with a control group with similar demographics or characteristics who didn’t see the ad.

According to Jon Gibbs, VP-media analytics at Nielsen “Paid and earned media work together in ways that could have implications well beyond Facebook. The market has been talking very much about how to buy paid media and how to earn earned media, but there’s been very little attention to the types of hybrid impressions and hybrid experience that blends these two. Facebook’s Social Ads present a fairly unique way of blending paid and earned impressions.”

Nielsen is the world’s leading marketing and media information company active in more than 100 countries, with headquarters in New York, USA.

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