From ASOS to Zara - comScore Release Report on Facebook Driving Purchase Behaviour in Europe
As mentioned at Wednesday's Facebook Marketing Conference, comScore have released their latest whitepaper - The Power of Like Europe: How Social Marketing Works for Retail Brands.
Focusing on European brands such as H&M, ASOS, La Redoute, Topshop and Zara, the independent research illustrates how popular consumer brands are using Facebook to deliver media impressions at scale, acheive brand amplification and resonance, and ultimately drive desired behaviours among key customer segments.
Fans or Friends of Friends of European advertisers such as ASOS.com, Topshop, and Zara, were disproportionately more likely to visit the brand websites - where purchases occur - compared to the average internet user.
The findings in the report suggest that advertisers need to move beyond measures such as click-throughs to evaluate social media ROI, and begin to analyse the consumer behaviour in the weeks following exposure to a branded message on Facebook or paid advertising on the site.
Some of the key findings that illustrate this include:
- 32% of a European Facebook user’s time is spent on the individual’s homepage, which features the News Feed – and the majority of branded content
- Friends of Fans represent a substantial potential audience for brands: looking at the top 1000 brand pages, for every fan there are an additional 81 friends of fans that can be reached. In France, La Redoute for example has 684,000 fans but a friends of fans audience of 22.2 million
- In Germany, the reach of the Zara site rose from 1% among the total internet population to over 12% among Fans exposed to brand messages (earned media)
- In the UK, ASOS fans were 3.6 times as likely to visit the ASOS website than non-fans, and friends of fans were 2.7 times as likely to visit the site
- Facebook advertising generated 130% uplift in purchase behaviour on the ASOS website in the four weeks following ad exposure**
- ASOS site visitors who are a fan or friend of fan are over 10% more likely to make a purchase on the ASOS site, compared to site visitors that are not within ASOS’s friend of fan reach
Buddy Media commented on the report saying it:
"...clearly demonstrates that advertisers need to move beyond traditional digital measures like click through rates, and begin to view Facebook as an important driver of sales through greater brand engagement and exposure. In particular, we can now see the power of friends of fans, who are 2.7 x more likely to visit a brand page than those with no links to the brand page. Fans are worth more than simply their ‘Like’ – they’re worth an entire extended network of potential customers.
“With this in mind, brands should be thinking in an integrated way about their paid, owned and earned activity on Facebook. Ads need to be carefully tailored to the target audience - within a context of good quality, engaging Page content - to generate the most consistently effective results. We’ve seen this approach working time and again for brands that want to generate deeper, more lasting relationships with consumers.”
// Download a complimentary copy of the report here
*The Power of Like Europe, follows the recent US Power of Like 2 study. With a focus on Europe, the latest paper illustrates how popular consumer brands deliver earned media impressions at scale, achieve brand amplification and resonance, and ultimately drive desired behaviours amongst key customer segments.
** This is relative to those consumers who were not exposed and importantly demonstrated a similar affinity to ASOS as the test group (e.g. site visitation and purchase) in the four weeks prior to the advertising campaign.
