DIGITAS PERSPECTIVE

Facebook Mobile: Three Ways For Brands To Drive Outcomes

For many brands, there are lingering questions about how much a Like on Facebook is worth. On the other hand, there are often direct relationships between mobile app usage and sales. For example, 40% of all Walgreens online prescription refills come from its mobile app (see: http://news.walgreens.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=5560). For those businesses that can directly measure the impact of mobile app usage on sales, Facebook Mobile is about to get very interesting as a performance marketing opportunity. Thats because a big part of performance marketing in mobile is driving app downloads and usage, and Facebook is launching advertising capabilities that will enable marketers to become highly effective in driving to those outcomes. Here are the pieces of the puzzle:

Targeting
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Facebook will be launching mobile advertising that targets consumers based on the apps they use, provided those apps are linked through the Facebook Connect feature, which allow users to log into websites and apps using their Facebook credentials. This means that if youre marketing a financial services mobile app, you will be able to target ads on Facebook Mobile specifically to users who have downloaded and used other financial services apps and who arent already owners of your app.

Scale
The next version of Apples operating system for iPhones and iPads, iOS6, will make it easier for users to log into apps via Facebook Connect because Facebook is integrated into the operating system. Users simply need to sign into Facebook once when they set up the phone and all of the apps that use Facebook Connect are automatically linked. That means that there likely will be a number of apps to target. As to the scale of the audience, the Facebook mobile app is the most downloaded iOS app. Ever.

Closed-loop
According to the Wall Street Journal article, Facebook is still deciding whether to enable tracking of what people do within the apps. If that does happen, that will mean that Facebook Mobile will give advertisers the ability to optimize not just based on whether the app was downloaded, but also on whether the user took high-value actions within the app. Thats not even mentioning the fact that Facebook has just launched its own mobile-app marketplace and its users have linked to apps from within timelines over 150 million times in a month. Of course, all of this is moot if the brand doesnt have an app whose usage can be tied to business results. That begs the question: Why not? On the smartphone in particular, mobile apps are the way that people take action. Whether its to refill a prescription, order a pizza, or book a hotel room, business outcomes on mobile devices are often the result of actions within a mobile app. That is why

August2012

DIGITAS PERSPECTIVE
performance marketing in mobile is very much about driving app usage. If Facebook delivers the capabilities as anticipated, it can be one of the premier mobile-performance-marketing platforms.

Contact for More Information

Chia Chen, SVP, Mobile Practice Lead, Digitas Twitter: @talk2Chia Email: chia.chen@digitas.com

August2012