Facebook to push measurement tools to reassure marketers of its value

Facebook will push investment into improving its measurement tools to reassure marketers of its value in 2015 after the company’s fourth quarter results showed a sharp increase in ad revenue.

During the brand’s earnings call yesterday (28 Jan), chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said that encouraging brands to invest more in Facebook’s ad platform will be the biggest “challenge and opportunity” of 2015.

Facebook’s Q4 2014 results were far from disappointing – ad revenue grew by 53% to $3.6bn. However, Sandberg said that while there has been some progress in new developments with video and ad-tech, which incorporates its ad platform and measuring tools, it is still early days for Facebook’s advertising efforts.

“There is a lot of hard work to do and we plan to invest aggressively,” she added.

Earlier in the call, founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook invested aggressively in improving ad-tech and measurement tools aimed at marketers in 2014.

The social network launched ‘conversion lift’ this week (27 Jan), a product that aims to allow marketers to measure the sales impact of their campaigns. Earlier in the year the brand also improved its Ad Manager platform to give better insight into audience impact and Atlas, which helps measure results across multiple devices.

Video has also become a priority for the brand, as the results showed that Facebook’s video platform generated three billion views per day.

However, Rebecca Mahony, CMO of video ad company Teads told Marketing Week that Facebook is yet to address the growing concerns of advertisers and brands surrounding the use of video.

“The biggest issue facing the industry is view ability,” Mahony said. “Facebook charges for adverts that have only been ‘viewed’ for three seconds, and whilst this complies with regulations, this simply does not go far enough.”

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