As Facebook puts more emphasis on monetization and more advertisers are spending on its platform, measurement is increasingly important.

The social network is still so new and comes with unique ad types and its own vocabulary, so many advertisers still aren’t sure how it fits in with the rest of their marketing efforts. The Facebook measurement team is working to put its ads in a more familiar context for advertisers and apply its research findings to offer better ad types and systems.

We spoke to Head of Measurement Research Development and Partnerships Sean Bruich about the questions Facebook is trying to answer, the value of a Like, how Facebook ads compare to more traditional channels and what needs to happen as marketers begin thinking cross-platform instead of in silos.

The following is an edited transcript from that interview.

Tell me more about your role and what your team does.

My team is the research development team, we also work on partnerships with third-party research companies like Nielsen and Datalogix. Our goal is twofold: to help build the right tools to help advertisers buy media to capture the value they’re trying to get, and the second piece to build out the measurement systems that help quantify that value and optimize campaigns, not just for e-commerce transactions, but a broader set of marketing outcomes like offline sales. It’s pretty simple, we’re trying to solve how you value an ad campaign online if one of your objectives is offline sales impact or one your objectives is staying top of mind. And the second piece is how do you translate all of those things that you know about other forms of marketing and understand whether online is accomplishing those same goals and how you would execute against those goals online.
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As Facebook looks to prove its value to advertisers, it has focused on conducting research that demonstrates whether online advertising impacts offline sales and that uses large data sets to gain insight into how to make campaigns more effective.

Facebook’s Head of Measurement Research Development and Partnerships Sean Bruich today spoke at the Webtrends Engage conference about some of the results of that research. Understanding these conclusions could help advertisers with their own campaigns and give people a better idea of how Facebook approaches its ad products.

Impressions create value

Findings from Nielsen, comScore and Facebook’s partnership with Datalogix indicate that ad clicks don’t necessarily lead to sales or ROI. Impressions, however, can be powerful. Facebook found that 99 percent of offline sales came from people who viewed ads on Facebook but didn’t click them. Neilsen’s research found no correlation between clickthrough rate and ROI. Bruich didn’t get into details about comScore’s study, but it similarly found that clicks didn’t correlate with conversions as much as other factors did.
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Facebook’s new Graph Search tool gives users who allow followers — formerly called subscribers — a way to learn about their audience.

Facebook launched asymmetrical following in September 2011. Users can allow followers to see their public updates in News Feed, similar to Twitter. The feature is commonly used by public figures and people who use Facebook to connect with people in their industry or who share similar interests. However, unlike with Facebook pages, users do not get any analytics about the audience that follows them.

Now with Graph Search, users can uncover some information about these followers. For instance, someone might want to know the countries or cities where their followers live. The most popular pages, movies, music and other interests of their followers might be relevant. Users might want know where their followers work or what schools they went to. They also might want to get an idea of the age, gender or education level of their followers. All of these insights are now accessible using Graph Search.

Users can look for overlap in people who follow them who also follow another user, or people who follow them who are interested in a topic. Of if a user wants to host a meet-up, they can search for followers who live nearby or in a particular city.

See also: How marketers can use Facebook’s Graph Search to understand consumers and Graph Search: a recommendation engine only Facebook could power

Facebook today announced changes to its mobile app install ad unit, including a way for iOS 6 users to download apps without leaving the social network. Developers also gained new tools for customizing their ad creative and seeing the results of their campaign.

Mobile app install ads, launched in October after beginning in beta in August, are feed-based ads to drive downloads of third-party iOS and Android applications. Developers can use the same demographic and interest-based targeting options as they can for other ads on the Facebook platform, including being able to target users who have not already connected with an app.

Typically these ads lead to the Apple App Store or Google Play, but now Facebook has created a way for iOS 6 users to see an App Store overlay within the Facebook app. These users can download a developer’s app without losing their place in News Feed. For now, Android users will still be taken out of the app and into Google Play.

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Social media analytics company Socialbakers announced Monday that it raised $6 million in a Series B round led by Index Ventures.

Socialbakers tracks publicly available analytics for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn, which can then be used for competitive analysis or other market research. The company makes some of this information freely available on its site, but advanced monitoring and insights are available with a pro plan priced according to how many pages or markets a business wants to track.

Socialbakers also offers a social media management and publishing platform, which includes some collaboration features like being able to assign tasks to other users. The company is certified with the apps, pages and insights badges in the Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer program.

Early Bird Venture Capital, which led the company’s $2 million Series A round a year ago, also participated in the latest round.

Socialbakers now has more than 160 employees across offices in San Francisco, Prague, Munich, London, Paris, Sao Paolo, Mexico City, Dubai and Istanbul.

Social advertising company Compass Labs this week announced the arrival of CLIQ Social Intelligence, a platform to provide brands and agencies with key insights about their audiences, including customer interests, media preferences, demographic makeup and more.

Compass Labs offers managed advertising services, as well as self-serve software, but VP of Marketing Molly Glover Gallatin says the company found that advertisers are looking for more than ad creation and optimization. The CLIQ Social Intelligence platform aims to give companies a better understanding of their owned and earned media, in addition to paid.

Businesses will be able to see their Facebook and Twitter analytics, track brand competitors and see trends among their fans. Beyond the gender, age and location information that is available from Facebook’s own insights tool, CLIQ Social Intelligence shows stats on family status and ethnicity. It also highlights the most popular sports, teams, athletes, music, movies, YouTube videos, websites and apps among a page’s fans.

This type of information can logically be applied to brands’ social ad targeting or content strategy, but many businesses are finding that these insights can influence all aspects of their marketing and overall business. For instance, a pet food brand learned that its fans had greater affinity for Target than Walmart, so it worked to get more of its products on the shelves at Target. Another brand is using its audience’s music preferences to seek out partnership opportunities with musicians for a new campaign.

With the new tool, Compass Labs can now claim the Facebook Preferred Marketing badge in Insights. It previously was only certified in ads.

Naked Communications and the Seventh Generation CPG brand were involved in the of the CLIQ Social Intelligence platform.

Social marketing software company Fan Appz today launches a version of its platform with an emphasis on helping businesses understand the audience that engages with their apps and putting those insights to use in other channels.

The Personalized Marketing Platform builds upon the social CRM functionality that Fan Appz introduced earlier this year and offers new ways to view and analyze consumer segments. Fan Appz has also created new ways to bring first-party data to its platform as well as apply social data to email marketing, advertising and other sales efforts.

Fan Appz VP of Marketing Krista Thomas says the company’s goal is to help businesses use social data to improve all marketing and understand fans at an individual level. By doing this, Fan Appz can help brands convert fans into customers and “turn good customers into great ones.”

It starts with “social experience apps.” These are the page tab, web and mobile apps that Fan Appz got its start helping marketers build. The company continues to build out features and improve the creation and customization flow for these. For instance, today Fan Appz released an Open Graph-enabled prediction and trivia game app, a new refer-a-friend feature and additional integration for Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and Google+.

When fans interact with a brand through these apps, the information they’ve authorized to share gets collected and organized in Fan Appz’ system — now built on the SAP HANA platform for speed and scalability. Thomas says this is one of the distinguishing factors of the Consumer Marketing Hub.

The product then allows marketers to sort through the social graph data, behavioral data and direct inputs provided by users, for example, product preferences entered into a ranking app or answers to a poll question. Businesses can also add in purchase data or other information from an existing CRM. They can view and export audience segments to run an email marketing campaign or Sponsored Stories using custom audience targeting.

As we talked about with CEO Jon Siegal when the company launched its Social Database, Fan Appz is looking to serve businesses during the next step of social marketing. If 2009 and 2010 were about establishing a presence on Facebook and building a following, and 2011 and 2012 were focused on the abstract goal of “engagement,” then Siegal sees the next phase being when businesses learn how to truly use social to drive sales. With social CRM solutions like what Fan Appz and others are starting to build, brands are going to be able to personalize messages at scale, making marketing more effective and improving the overall customer experience.

Turn gets access to Ads API – Digital advertising platform Turn this week announced support for the Facebook Ads API. The company is an early Facebook Exchange partner, but until recently did not offer the ability to buy social ads like Sponsored Stories, Page Post Ads and other Facebook mobile and News Feed-based ads.

Optimal launches Audience Matrix tool – Social media advertising and audience analytics platform Optimal released its Audience Matrix product for Facebook this week. The tool gives brands and advertisers in-depth information about a specific audience on Facebook, using any of the types of targeting available, including Facebook page fans, users who like similar brands, people who live in a certain area, specific mobile device users and more. Audience Matrix is built on Optimal’s proprietary consumer analytics database of more than 2.5 million affinities and interests, and provides instant access to tens of billions of consumer data points across social media platforms.

Unmetric adds SatisfactionMetrics to benchmarking tool  Social media benchmarking company Unmetric this week released a suite of features designed to help brands understand their own social customer service strategies and how they stack up to the competition. With Unmetric’s satisfaction analysis, brands can see insights like how often they are apologizing to fans or how long it takes to respond to comments on Facebook.

SumAll brings Instagram insights to its platform – Analytics platform SumAll‘s newest social analytics tool gives marketers more data about their Instagram activity. Users can track their activity and engagement over time, look at their most-used photo filters and compare Instagram performance to other social platforms, including how each may have driven sales.

Facebook analytics platform PageLever has introduced PageLever Now, which newest features include Facebook engagement analytics displayed in real time.

With real-time insights, page admins can now pinpoint the exact time when fans are engaging with their page’s posts. The tool features a graph that traces fan activity over the last 48 hours to help page managers decide when to publish their page posts and optimize engagement. It will also allow page manaagers to see the time frame in which a post remains relevant and help prevent them from overflowing fans’ News Feeds with too many posts.

The real-time graph shows when a post’s engagement dies down, telling page managers if they should hold off on introducing a new post as fans are still engaging with the previous one. PageLever co-founder Jeff Widman tells us that the new feature will benefit those looking to understand their audience’s engagement habits with discernable evidence.

Below the real-time engagement graph, instead of listing page posts in chronological order, PageLever Now lists posts in order of current activity. For example, if an admin has just published a new post, but a fan has just commented on a previous post, the post with more recent activity receives priority and is pushed to the top. Widman tells us this is the first time he has seen this feature for a Facebook analytics tool.

In addition to page insights, PageLever has added new features to its dashboard, making it easier for admins managing more than one page. This includes a sidebar listing each page for which user is admin, a built-in page post publisher, a calendar of scheduled posts and image search.

PageLever, which was founded in August 2011, added post tagging and alerts to its insights platform in May.

About 20.1 percent of Facebook users connect to the service on an Android device compared to 18.9 percent of users who connect with an iOS device, according to data from Optimal, Inc.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer last week that Facebook had more users on Android than iOS. We asked social media advertising and analytics platform provider Optimal for the details.

Optimal’s data shows about 189.8 million users active on Android devices — accessing Facebook through the native app or the mobile web. About 178.3 million are active on iOS. That’s among 944.2 million monthly active users addressable with the Facebook Ads API, not the full billion announced last week.

Below are the top 20 territories with the highest share of Android usage. The “Index” figure in the chart shows relative prevalence of each OS versus the population, so it compares global Android penetration to Android penetration in that country — and does the same for iOS.

Android has the highest share in South Korea, where it is used by 52.6 percent of the population versus 20.3 percent using iOS. Singapore and Australia have the highest iOS penetration, both with 48.8 percent of the population using Apple’s mobile OS.

The U.S. has the highest collective penetration of Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, with 83.5 percent of the Facebook population using these devices each month. The country is among the 38 percent of territories with more iOS than Android usage. In the U.S., 44.1 percent of users are on iOS versus 39.4 on Android.

The countries with the next largest population of Facebook users, Brazil and India, both use Android more than iOS, but these devices make up a smaller percentage of overall use as feature phones still dominate these markets. In Brazil, for example, Android has 11.8 percent share and iOS has 6.4 percent share.

U.K. Facebook users are split 28.2 percent on iOS and 16.2 percent on Android.

Facebook does not share an exact breakdown of how many users access the social network via native apps compared to the mobile web, but Zuckerberg says overall more people use the mobile web than native iOS and Android apps combined. The company has recently been working to improve its native offerings. The iOS app was updated at the end of August, focusing on speed by replacing some HTML5 with native functionality. Engadget reports today that a new native Facebook for Android app is in the final stages of testing, according to an anonymous source. Zuckerberg previously said that this was in the works, but did not offer a time frame for when it would be available.

Early tests from Optimal and other advertising companies showed that clickthrough and conversion rates were higher on Android than iPhone, though costs per click and per fan were higher. Optimal says Android users took additional actions, such as viewing profile photos, Liking posts and commenting, more often than iPhone users did.