This year marked the first time USA Today digitized its 23-year-old Super Bowl Ad Meter by rolling it out to Facebook in app form. You know lots of love weigh in on Superbowl ads. What hasn’t been known until today is the impact that Facebook had on the Ad Meter’s reception.
The app’s more than six million users accounted for two million video views and 200,000 ratings of Super Bowl ads. But because the app used Facebook’s Open Graph—which allows actions like watching or rating a video to be automatically shared to a user’s News Feed, as long ast they've given the app permission—an additional 200,000 views were generated.
And for every 100 pieces of content that were shared through the app, 120 users checked out the app, according to USA Today and Facebook. USA Today also saw an 11 percent increase in visitors to the Ad Meter page and a 9 percent jump in time spent on the page the day of the big game.
USA Today worked with social marketing firm Involver in developing the app, and that company’s vp of marketing Roland Smart claimed the app drove more content into the News Feed “than any other campaign-based [Open Graph] app ever.”
For instance, in the month following the app’s launch, each action shared through the app was seen by more than 10 people. However, over time where people were coming across those actions shifted.
Within the first week of the Ad Meter launching, 67 percent of traffic came from Facebook's News Feed, Ticker or other external sources, but by week two 82 percent of the app’s traffic came from Facebook Timeline, implying that users saw in a friend’s profile that they had watched or rated a video and then clicked through to the app. Four weeks after the app launched, 97 percent of its traffic, or more than 5 million referrals, came through Timeline, said Smart.