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Using data from 46 businesses and over 21,000 ads, this study provides an analysis of the relationship between advertising spend, engagement and ad recall on Facebook. An initial analysis reveals that advertising spend, and post comments are positively associated with ad recall, while frequency is negatively associated. A second analysis, segmented the data by the advertiser objective of brand awareness, video views or post engagement and reveals additional insight into the relationships between the variables. It is concluded that Facebook offers an effective channel to drive recall, but that advertisers should be careful to avoid ad fatigue. In total, the results provide evidence that Facebook advertising can easily become intrusive, and that brand awareness driven advertising exhibit the most promising relationship with ad recall.
Keywords: engagement, brand communication, social media, recall, ad technology, Facebook advertising, ad fatigue, advertising effects
INTRODUCTION
Social media has rapidly become a part of people's everyday life. Offering the ability to connect, communicate and share, U.S. consumers spend about two hours daily on social media (Clement, 2019). While overall social media use and advertising expenditures continue to increase, much remains to be understood about the effects of brand communication in social media, especially regarding engagement and message recall. On one hand, Facebook is especially attractive to advertisers for its targeting attributes like custom audiences (Venkatadri et al. 2018) as well as its user-facing affordances (Bossetta, 2018; Davis & Chouinard, 2016). Providing a surplus of data, tools like Facebook are becoming increasingly useful to understand consumer behavior, engagement, and overall advertising effectiveness. However, on the other hand, little is understood about effects of advertising recall. Advancing this challenge is the fact that social media technologies are operated largely by invisible algorithms (Bucher, 2017). However, to mitigate this and explore effects related to ad recall on Facebook, this study examines a large data set sourced from a sample of 46 national advertisers. The broad goal of this paper is to advance our theoretical understanding of advertising effects through brand communications on social media through the lens of Facebook engagement.
Defined as the estimated number of people to recall an ad within two days of being served the ad, the Facebook ad recall lift metric has become a key component of the Facebook...