Facebook and The Nielsen Company today announced that Nielsen BrandLift™, which uses the Facebook platform to measure the effectiveness of online brand advertising, is now available in the U.K. This is the latest component of Nielsen’s portfolio of advertising effectiveness solutions and marks the first product available outside the U.S. from Facebook’s and Nielsen’s global, multi-year strategic alliance.

“Helping marketers measure the effectiveness of advertising using Facebook has been a priority for us and working with Nielsen helps us continue doing just that. Marketers have responded positively to BrandLift studies in the U.S. and we know marketers in the U.K. will also benefit from a better understanding of how people react to their online campaigns,” said Stephen Haines, Facebook’s U.K. Commercial Director.

“The power and scale of Facebook’s community provides a unique platform for research and this offering complements the portfolio of tools available to marketers in the U.K. with simple and fast insights on brand advertising. Facebook and Nielsen are committed to changing how people think about online advertising, particularly looking beyond direct response to the effectiveness of the Internet for brand-oriented campaigns. To do this we intend to quickly build up a body of work in the UK to provide local benchmarks to supplement those already available from studies done in the U.S.,” said Louise Ainsworth, EMEA Managing Director, of Nielsen’s online division.

So far, more than 70 studies have been conducted in the U.S. across the Fast Moving Consumer Goods, Retail, Media & Entertainment, Technology, Telecom, Financial and Automotive sectors. These studies revealed swift changes in brand ‘lift’ metrics such as awareness, especially for products and brands that are new or less well known. Not every advertising campaign resulted in a change in consumer attitudes; however 97 percent of studies saw statistically significant lift on at least one key brand lift metric while 85 percent of studies saw increases across at least two key metrics.

Nielsen data shows that Facebook had a 10.2 percent share of display-ad views in the U.K. in 2009, up from 6.4 percent in 2008. At the start of 2010, almost 60 percent of Britons active online visited the site, which accounted for just over 17 percent of all UK time on the Internet.

Download the Facebook and Nielsen U.K. press release.