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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Social games have lower costs per click on Facebook than brands do, analysis shows

Posted: 16 Apr 2012 03:16 PM PDT

On average, brands advertising on Facebook pay more per click than social game companies do, according to data provided to us by third-party vendor AdParlor.

Facebook ad costs continue to rise across a number of industries as competition increases, particularly among consumer brands and the hardcore social game sector. Advertisers can use this information to better understand their own Facebook ad performance.

The social network does not do much to help advertisers interpret the results of their campaigns. CPCs and clickthrough rates mean little without averages to benchmark against, but advertisers must look to third parties for comparison. A recent survey from Social Fresh found advertisers self-reporting an average CPC of $0.80. This latest data from AdParlor, a Facebook Ads API partner, shows daily fluctuations in average CPC but the rate is always below $0.80.

For social games, average CPCs are even lower. AdParlor CEO Hussein Fazal says this is because social game advertisers can define narrow targets that result in higher CTRs and lower CPCs than most brands can achieve. However, there is variation within the social game category. Hardcore games — those designed for longer session times that include more strategy or combat– have higher CPCs than virtual world games, including simulation games, pets and city games. Both of these categories have higher CPCs than casual social games, like puzzles and trivia. This could be related to there being more competition in the hardcore social gaming space, but Fazal also believes that hardcore games are getting better at monetizing and so they are able to pay more to acquire each new user.

AdParlor's data comes from more than 500 clients across a range of industries. This first graph shows how CPC compares for brands and agencies versus social game developers. It represents a sample size of 100 million clicks between June 23, 2011 and Feb. 27, 2012. The thick blue line represents average CPC rates for agencies and brands. The thick green line represents average CPC rates for social games. The thin lines are the corresponding linear regressions for each category.

This graph takes a deeper dive into the differences among types of social games. Although it covers a shorter period, Jan. 1 through Feb. 17, it represents a sample size of 150 million clicks. The thick blue line represents hardcore social games, red is virtual world games and green is casual games. Again the thin lines are the linear regressions for each category.

Dailymotion, social readers, Instagram, Viddy, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook apps by MAU

Posted: 16 Apr 2012 08:48 AM PDT

Dailymotion led a number of media-related applications on our list of the top 20 growing Facebook apps by monthly active users this week.

Titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 900,000 and 16.3 million MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain,%
1.   Dailymotion 22,200,000 +16,300,000 + 276%
2.   Yahoo! Social Bar 40,500,000 +11,400,000 + 39%
3.   Scribd 26,100,000 +5,000,000 + 24%
4.   Instagram 11,800,000 +4,500,000 + 62%
5.   Pandora 15,700,000 +4,000,000 + 34%
6.   Rotten Tomatoes 19,000,000 +3,400,000 + 22%
7.   Terra 4,000,000 +3,350,000 + 515%
8.   WP Social Reader 17,100,000 +3,100,000 + 22%
9.   Bing 28,400,000 +3,000,000 + 12%
10.   Draw Something by OMGPOP 36,100,000 +2,900,000 + 9%
11.   Zynga Slingo 16,800,000 +2,800,000 + 20%
12.   Viddy 3,700,000 +2,760,000 + 294%
13.   Flixster 3,800,000 +2,200,000 + 138%
14.   The Travel List Challenge 2,300,000 +2,070,000 + 900%
15.   Siz.net 2,600,000 +2,050,000 + 373%
16.   Angry Birds 22,500,000 +1,700,000 + 8%
17.   İzlesene 8,600,000 +1,600,000 + 23%
18.   The Guardian 5,800,000 +1,600,000 + 38%
19.   Bubble Witch Saga 19,600,000 +1,100,000 + 6%
20.   Static IFRAME Tab : Note Icon 3,100,000 +900,000 + 41%

Dailymotion grew by 16.3 million MAU over the past week. Part of this growth could be related to the fact that the Open Graph app automatically posts videos watched on the video site to users’ Timelines, Tickers and News Feeds. Other video apps that made the list included the Turkish sites İzlesene and Siz.net. News apps on our list included: Yahoo! Social Bar, Terra, WP Social Reader and The Guardian. Rotten Tomatoes' Timeline app allows users to share movie-related info to the stream.

Scribd and Bing's Facebook integrations both made the list. The recently acquired Instagram app and its video equivalent, Viddy were popular this week. Then there was Pandora, the Timeline movie app Flixster and The Travel List Challenge, which is a quiz app where users can share travel experiences, and posts to the steam.

Games on the list were led by Draw Something by OMGPOP, which along with Zynga Slingo, grew by almost 3 million MAU.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

tirsdag den 17. april 2012 at 07.22