Facebook & the Mobile Advertising Shift

When Facebook recently announced earnings, it was interesting – though not surprising to us – how often analytics issues and performance metrics came up. This story highlights how Mark Zuckerberg himself “expects the company will ultimately make more money from user activity on mobile, based on time spent.”

The “time spent” is the sort of key metric that helps businesses figure out realistic targets, whether or not they have 604 million mobile users, like Facebook does. Plus, they can use that metric as a baseline or comparison for figuring out how their users and targets are moving across channels – a clear digital analytics best practice that many companies are struggling with. The bottom line is that Facebook appears to be giving very careful thought to metrics, both the ones by which they measure their own performance and those that they can offer to advertisers.

Of course, in the meantime,

advertisers … [who] are still trying to determine how to calculate the efficacy of digital ads, have been slow to spend as much on smartphones.

In other words, figuring out the metrics on mobile marketing is a critical first step for that market to reach maturity.