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Facebook has announced a partnership with Nielsen to help advertisers monitor the ROI of their advertising programs. Generally, there are two primary types of online advertising: 1) direct sales marketing, and 2) branded ad campaigns.

Direct sales models, like online affiliate marketing or email marketing, have already been proven. However, large brands are just getting their feet wet when it comes to online advertising – especially when it comes to full marketing campaigns (see Vitamin Water for a great example of this). The main hold up? The serious lack of ways to monitor the effectiveness of campaigns.

How do you measure, for example of the ROI of a Facebook application? Number of interactions? TOMA (Top Of Mind Advertising)? Number of users? It’s difficult to track the impact of a single advertising program on a user’s awareness of a product or service; and companies spending billions of dollars in advertising like to see where their investment is working.

Facebook has made a smart move by partnering with Nielsen, the company which is most dominant in the medium which Facebook is attempting to steal branded ad dollars from: television. The goal of the program is to let Nielsen customers “measure the impact of the ads they buy on Facebook”. Advertisers can perform market research among two primary user groups: those that have viewed their advertisements and those who haven’t.

In June, Fred Vogelstein wrote about Facebook’s plan to dominate the internet by helping to reach the “promised land of online brand advertising.” Television already has a solution: Nielsen metrics. Now Facebook is looking to leverage the company’s diverse set of Fortune 500 clients to get them to pour their money into what should be the worlds largest social platform. It’s something Google has failed to accomplish as Vogelstein wrote:

Google has courted them for four years, to no avail. That’s because, while search ads are great at delivering advertising to users who are seeking specific products, they are less effective at creating demand for stuff users don’t yet know they want.

Now Facebook will provide brands with something television never had the capacity to deliver: immediate feedback. After users are exposed to a brand’s campaign, various polls will be run to test what the impact was. Tie in Facebook Connect as a tool for measuring branded campaign exposure in locations off the site and you begin to understand what Facebook is attempting to accomplish.

AllFacebook contributed to this article