Performance advertising success stories in social media (#SocialMedia)

In marketing Social Media branding and advertising services, we are often asked about the efficacy of these emerging marketing tool. While it is easy to illustrate the obvious benefits of being able to monitor the web presence and increased traffic which are produced by the social media campaigns, businesses are still seeking comfort as tot he effectiveness of these campaigns.

Lightspeed Venture Partners has found some interesting dynamics and case studies which support the credibility and utility of these campaigns on their blog:

Comscore recently noted that performance advertising adopts online media faster than brand advertising because it is easier to measure results over short time periods. The knock on social media ad inventory has been that CTRs are low. This is less relevant for performance advertisers who only pay on the click or the action anyway. We heard about some terrific success stories for performance advertisers in social media on the panel who are seeing ROI on their ad spend comparable to Google. more....

Our friend, Scott Rafer has been taking advantage of this phenomenon at Lookery.com:

Lookery has exactly aggregated 60M+ social profiles of “age, gender and location, the three key elements for targeting,” which advertisers can use on any ad network, anywhere on the web for a flat fee. In our particular case, we’ve assembled those profiles in a white-hat, no-PII, privacy friendly manner that we’re happy to discuss in detail. We should be at 100M+ profiles by the end of Q2 2009. All the profiles are in English-speaking countries, Western Europe, and the Gulf states.