Facebook Gets a Face Lift

Katherine Bennett - February 22, 2010

If you’ve logged into Facebook recently, it’s apparent that some features have moved around. The general navigation is at the top right, the subcategories for advertising are on the far left and messaging as well as notifications are icons on the top left. However, with all these changes, the biggest change that Facebook has made recently is offering a beta test of conversion tracking to a small group of advertisers.

Conversion tracking, according to Facebook “allows you to track activity that happens on your website as a result of someone on Facebook seeing or clicking your Facebook Ad.” This will be a key benefit for marketers, once Facebook opens up conversion tracking to everyone. Conversion tracking allows marketers to track performance of Facebook ads, which helps them optimize their advertising strategies. A likely outcome is that more companies will be willing to give Facebook ads a try.

Many companies haven’t advertised on Facebook yet because they don’t know how to calculate their ROI. Some have the opinion that because their analytics didn’t show any sales or leads from Facebook then it must not work. However, this is not the case. In fact, the opposite may be true. There are many people who will buy from a company’s site because they saw an ad on Facebook. (This is similar to Google’s view through conversion- read View through Conversion Tracking and Advocate for Display Ads).  Now, with Facebook conversion tracking, Facebook will start to get more credit for sales or leads that it’s bringing to a company’s website.

Facebook is making itself more appealing to marketers. Conversion tracking will be a huge asset and it will encourage those who have been skeptical, to take the Facebook jump. It will be interesting to see how Facebook evolves and what other features they add in the future.