Determining effectiveness of promoting stories within a social networking system

A method comprising:

• receiving a sponsored story request from a promoting user, the sponsored story request identifying a story associated with an action stored by the social networking system and providing one or more parameters including a bid amount;
• receiving a request from a viewing user for presentation of one or more stories, each describing an action stored by the social networking system;
• retrieving a plurality of candidate stories including the story identified by the sponsored story request;
• determining a score for each of the candidate stories, a score for the story identified by the sponsored story request based at least in part on the bid amount of the sponsored story request;
• selecting one or more stories for presentation to the viewing user based at least in part on the determined scores for each of the candidate stories;
• if the story identified by the sponsored story request is included in the selected one or more stories, determining whether the story identified by the sponsored story request would be included in the selected one or more stories without the bid amount of the sponsored story request;
• determining a statistic based at least in part on whether the story identified by the sponsored story request would be included in the selected one or more stories without the bid amount;
• and
• storing the determined statistic.

A method comprising:

• presenting one or more stories to a user of a social networking system, each story associated with the user or with an additional user connected to the user;
• receiving, from the user of a social networking system, a request to promote a story from the presented one or more stories, the story including content posted to the social networking system by the user or by an additional user connected to the user;
• prompting the user to provide one or more parameters for defining a sponsored story request associated with at least one of the action and the object in the story, the one or more parameters including a bid amount;
• receiving the one or more parameters from the user for defining the sponsored story request;
• and
• storing the sponsored story request in a database, the sponsored story request defining a condition for providing a sponsored story to a viewing user who has a connection in the social networking system to another user who has interacted with at least one of the action and the object, the sponsored story describing the other user's interaction with at least one of the action and the object.