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One of the many ways that ads get in front of your eyeballs on Facebook and Instagram is that the social networking giant lets an advertiser upload a list of phone numbers or email addresses it has on file; it will then put an ad in front of accounts associated with that contact information. A clothing retailer can put an ad for a dress in the Instagram feeds of women who have purchased from them before, a politician can place Facebook ads in front of anyone on his mailing list, or a casino can offer deals to the email addresses of people suspected of having a gambling addiction. Facebook calls this a “custom audience.”

You might assume that you could go to your Facebook profile and look at your “contact and basic info” page to see what email addresses and phone numbers are associated with your account, and thus what advertisers can use to target you. But as is so often the case with this highly efficient data-miner posing as a way to keep in contact with your friends, it’s going about it in a less transparent and more invasive way.

Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that I’ve come to call “shadow contact information.”

CTR by itself is a poor indicator of ad performance and may be “completely unrelated, or even negatively correlated, to the other measures capturing metrics such as calls, directions and store visits” As mobile display campaigns are optimized for CTR, it negatively impacts secondary actions such as calls and directions Lower CTRs were often associated with the highest offline in-store visitation rates

if marketers and brands are relying exclusively on CTR they’re not getting an accurate picture of which ads actually deliver true engagement and are “working.” In addition the risk of inadvertent clicks (the “fat finger” problem) is relatively high, casting further doubt on CTR.

A solid lead generation strategy does both, Craig Rosenberg, author of the blog Funnelholic, told me. The appetite for content online is insatiable so marketers would be wise to indulge the public with registration-free content, Craig says. “I do believe that if people are addicted to content without the reg-path and you path stuff, it better be remarkable.” Rosenberg says the “vast majority” of your marketing funnel should be free without asking potential clients for personal info. Save the registration forms for further down the funnel where more research-heavy content like whitepapers resides.

Chris Jablonski, author Emerging Tech blog on ZDNet, who provided the following formula: 10% to 20% fully gated content, 20% to 30% name and email only, and 50% to 70% completely free.

Google is launching a new “Store Visits” metric in AdWords, designed to use your customers’ location to determine whether they’ve visited your stores, restaurants, and hotels after clicking on an ad.

“…most mobile research leads to a purchase, just not on the smartphone.”

“In a March 2014 survey conducted by Nielsen for xAd and Telmetrics, between 70% and 80% of US smartphone or tablet users said they had completed or would soon complete a purchase related to their smartphone search. The study also found that more than 40% of consumers considered a smartphone or tablet their most important media resource for a purchase decision.”

Reach is not public data, and very few people (likely less than 20 companies across the globe) have the ability to access a significant number of pages’ reach metrics. So most (if not all) of what you’ve read on the subject is probably irrelevant, or greatly exaggerated.

Among the 142 industries (Facebook page categories) we have in the sample, only 18 are up or steady. But among the 124 categories seeing their organic reach going down, there are still a lot of them reaching more than 15 or 20% of their fans organically for each post.

We focused on the Organic Reach metric for posts (the only one that cannot include paid reach) of over 6,000 pages. We then averaged Organic reach by industry and compared the results between the two periods (July 2013 & May 2014)

"Facebook is establishing itself as a destination for premium video content, and demonstrating a willingness to pay significant amounts of money for that content. Facebook can likely drive revenue growth to offset content costs, albeit at lower margins than what the company currently generates," analyst Brian Wieser wrote in a note to clients Wednesday. "However, because of measurement issues the company has faced in the past (and possibly a new one identified by a trade publication in Australia and replicated by us within the United States), we think the primary winner of Facebook's expansion in video will be third party measurement firms," he added.

Facebook apologized for overstating video viewership times in September last year. The company said a metric for average user time spent on videos was artificially inflated.

The firm's analyst cites Australian trade publication AdNews, which revealed last week "Facebook's claims to reach 1.7mm more 16-39 year-olds in Australia than exist in the country according to its census bureau."

The people talking metric lumps together the number of people who have liked, commented or shared a brand's post or page, or engaged in some other way. But some advertisers place different values on various forms of interactions - for instance, attributing a higher value to a comment than a like.

Without Facebook-reported daily likes and comments, marketers and agencies will need to track them manually. For those tracking larger pages with multiple posts, that could get tedious. Companies like PageLever could benefit from the change.

PTAT brings everything together by measuring all of the individual Facebook users who have engaged with a page’s content and created a “story” in their News Feed and their friends News Feeds in the past seven days.

Prior to the introduction of PTAT in the Fall 2011, most marketers relied on a mashup of metrics – including the number of Likes, active users, comments and other performance indicators – to measure the health of their page.

According to Facebook the different types of stories measured in your PTAT score include: Liking your page Liking, commenting on, or sharing your page post Answering a Question you’ve asked Responding to your event Mentioning your page Tagging your page in a photo Checking in or recommending your place

we looked at four post types: link posts, video posts, photo posts and status updates. When paid media is applied to an organic post, it can significantly increase Facebook metrics – from impressions (obviously), to conversions – so we removed all posts with paid impressions from the analysis. For both time periods, we took the total reach for each post type and divided it by the total post count for that post type to get the average reach per post type for the given time frame.

As expected, the average reach per post on status updates decreased after the algorithm change. Significantly.

Photo and video posts had no discernible change in reach after the algorithm change as we would expect. This is good news for marketers who already regularly integrate rich media into their post strategies as it is well documented that images and video generate greater fan engagement – and from this research, it looks clear that they will continue to do so.

For Facebook, the new Premium Video Ads are an attempt to capture TV-size ad dollars with the lure of offering targeting capabilities — as well as reach — that television can’t match.

The video ads “autoplay” when a Facebook user scrolls through his or her newsfeed, but the sound is muted by default. As with any new form of advertising, the approach risks irritating users: NBC’s promos have already garnered a few negative comments (“Why can’t I get this crap off my timeline,” one commenter said) but generally reaction has been favorable.

Beatty said NBC will evaluate the effectiveness of the Facebook video ads in the short term on engagement and metrics like number of shares.

Many platforms and tools (Buzzsumo, Traackr, LittleBird, Tracx, Klout, etc.) try to identify and quantify influencer metrics such as: Relevance Reach/Audience Quality Engagement Activity

when a brand is working with an influencer the perceived potential (“I have 18 million followers!!!”, etc…) of the influencer to create great content and move an audience has surprisingly little to do with how well they perform at attracting an audience to their branded content.

We have found the most under-appreciated relationship is the third leg of the triangle: the relationship between the author and the brand, which are driven by both tangible rewards (fairness, upside) and intangible motivations (autonomy, reputation, and mastery).