Advertising through social networking sites has become popular and is the effective mode of online advertising. comScore, a global leader in measuring the digital world came up with a new product comScore Ad Metrix social to analyze the social side of display advertising.
Advertising by social side includes socially-published ads and socially-enabled ads. Socially-published ads are the brand’s display ads which appear on social networking sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Whereas, socially-enabled ads are the standard IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) display ads which click through to Facebook or other social networking sites. These ads generally include an emblem along with phrases such as “Like us on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter”. Most of the companies are using these social-calls-to-action in their display ad campaigns in order to support and strengthen their presence in social media. However, both these trends of social networking advertising are popular in the United States.
The comScore study reported top social display advertisers in the US. Among them, AT&T occupied the top position in terms of its number of socially-published ads in August 2011 with 3.9 billion ad impressions, followed by Experian Interactive and IAC (InterActive Corp). IAC had the highest percentage of ads published on a social media site which was found to be 38.8%. In terms of socially-enabled ads, Mars Incorporated occupied the top position with about 300 million impressions among its brands. Most of the top ten advertisers with respect to socially-enabled ads were consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies. These days, CPG industry has focused more on social advertising.