Social advertising is changing how brands connect with customers and fans. eMarketer estimates that worldwide paid advertising on Facebook will reach $5.89 billion this year and continue rising by more than 20% annually through 2015, when spend will approach $9 billion. With billions of people on social networks, marketers need to be sure their social ads are delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

One company that uses social ads to grow their business is KIXEYE. The online gaming powerhouse responsible for popular titles like Backyard Monsters, Battle Pirates, War Commander, and VEGA Conflict attracts high-quality social gamers at the lowest possible cost but also keeps them active and engaged via innovative social advertising campaigns.

Today, we’re happy to share a new report from Nucleus Research that shows the value KIXEYE achieved by standardizing its social advertising on Salesforce Social.com, the industry leading social advertising application within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Using social advertising to attract new social gamers and keep current players engaged

KIXEYE embraces the social revolution and sees the value of social to drive business results.  However, the company needed an advanced application that could be used to manage its social advertising campaigns, as well as enterprise-level client service so its marketing team could focus on optimizing campaigns instead of managing technology.

KIXEYE evaluated about two-dozen social advertising applications and ultimately selected Social.com for two main reasons. First, the KIXEYE team found that Social.com is the most reliable, scalable tool for managing its Facebook advertising. Second, KIXEYE’s interaction with the Social.com product team convinced them that both the team and product are first class.

“We’re extremely focused on yield; the lifetime value of a user vs. the acquisition cost. With Social.com, we can leverage monetization data within the tool to instantly measure the yield of a campaign and make decisions that increase revenue and margins,” says Mark Braatz, Director, User Acquisition, KIXEYE.

It took KIXEYE less then a week to get its campaigns up and running on Social.com.

The Benefits 

Salesforce.com is excited to announce that KIXEYE achieved the following benefits by using Social.com:

• Extend the acquisition life cycle of games by six months. Because Social.com combines 
campaign performance data with downstream engagement metrics in one interface, the KIXEYE marketing team can quickly understand the effective margins of a campaign and adjust targeting to increase ROI.
• Increased marketer productivity. Moving to Social.com reduced the time KIXEYE spent troubleshooting campaign problems, enabled the company to streamline and automate much of the processes around areas like custom audience targeting, and ultimately let the team focus on optimization instead of campaign setup and launch. 
• Reduced advertising costs by 15%. Social.com enabled KIXEYE to reduce its overall advertising costs while increasing user volume and retention. Nucleus Research estimated KIXEYE would have needed to increase its advertising budget by 15 percent to attain the same results without Social.com.

Thank you to KIXEYE for sharing their story with the salesforce.com community. We’re also happy to answer your questions in the comments. How is your organization managing its social advertising?