How Will Video Ads Affect Facebook?

With video ads on the horizon, we can only wonder if this will be the end of Facebook. They have slowly rolled out additional ad products in attempt to monetize their free service. Mark Zuckerberg, Chairman and CEO, also expressed their eagerness to venture further into mobile during a recent earnings call:

“…comScore put out a report saying that Facebook is now 23% of all time spent on apps in the U.S., and one of the next biggest apps is Instagram at 3%. So, put together, we’re now more than a quarter of the time spent in apps. Today, there’s no argument. Facebook is a mobile company. As I’ve said before, there are three main parts of our strategy; build the best mobile products, build the platform and services that leverage the social graph, and build a really strong monetization effort engine.”

What does this all mean? In Facebook’s eyes, mobile is an untapped revenue opportunity. Now, monetization efforts will no longer focus solely on desktop ads.

With the advent of the “new” News Feed, the emphasis is clearly on visual content. According to Ad Age, the video ad product will be targeted to users’ News Feeds on desktop and mobile devices. The ads are expected to be capped at 15 seconds and will autoplay.

Are marketers excited? Absolutely. This opens up a whole world of opportunity for advertising to Facebook users. Are Facebook users excited? This one is up for discussion. Facebook has to be wary of introducing another new ad product for fears that it might be viewed as intrusive.

How do you feel Facebook users will respond to video ads?

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Image credit: birgerking

This Little Symbol Tells You If Facebook Is Watching…

In an effort to promote consumer awareness, The Digital Advertising Alliance launched the icon below to alert you on ads that are being served based on behavioral targeting aka interest-based advertising.

Launching soon, when you see this symbol, you will know you are being tracked for third-party retargeting ads on Facebook:

These ads are served via Facebook Ad Exchange. The intended goal is to show ads based on specific interests. In Facebook’s eyes, this method gives consumers more control by using their interests to serve more relevant ads. How do Facebook retargeting ads work? This diagram from BMO Capital Markets analyst Dan Salmon takes a crack at mapping it out:

Google Retargeting tends to outperform typical Search campaigns. But when it comes to Facebook ads, lately they just don’t perform like they used to. Many consumers are blind to them as they are bombarded with ads throughout the News Feed and right-hand column. Despite the performance of traditional Facebook ads, this method of Facebook retargeting may very well demonstrate increased ad performance. So far the results sound promising according to Exchange partners.

As a consumer, I understand that I’m most likely going to see ads if I am not paying a subscription fee. So from this mindset, I suppose it would be more beneficial to at least see ads for products and services that are relevant to my specific interests.

Keep an eye out for this little icon. I have a feeling we will be seeing it more often.

Watch this video to learn more:



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Facebook PPC Ads that Kill

Facebook’s pay-per-click (PPC) is still considered fairly new. Nonetheless, we’ve been playing in it long enough to put together some best practices for marketing on Facebook. These tips will help you get an edge over the competition in Facebook’s advertising platform:

1. A picture is worth a thousand words – Although Facebook ads allow for a small image, it is very easy to blend in with all the visual stimulation happening on a person’s page. We recommend using bold, bright colors to help your ad stand out. Red or orange is good – stay away from blue or white, which are Facebook’s colors and acts like camouflage.  You can also add a bright border to your image to make it pop out from the screen. Always keep the image (and the ad itself) to a singular focus. Trying to fit too much into one ad will definitely limit your ROI; besides, you can simply create another ad with different information. 
2. Get to the point – As any marketing professional knows, your ad copy should be geared toward your target audience. Since these ads are so brief, focus on benefits and include a call to action – the stronger, the better! We’ve also found that mentioning the company name works quite well. Remember, you only have 90 characters for body copy, but sometimes less is more so try writing only 40-70 characters and test your ads.
3. Hit a bulls eye – Targeting your ads is obviously important, but this feature is continuously changing on Facebook, so we suggest you learn about all the different targeting options and stay up-to-date (hint: we often post updates on this blog.) We also recommend that you turn on the “show social activity” feature, even if your ad goes to an external link. We call this “passive word of mouth” and you can see how it shows up in the example below. 

 Do you have any other tips for creating a successful advertising campaign on Facebook? Please share your ideas in the comments section below.

Facebook Ad Retargeting: A Possibility for the Near Future

A new advertising method appears to be on the horizon for Facebook.

I have a feeling advertisers will get very excited about this…

Facebook Exchange is their first cookie-based ad retargeting solution. Josh Constine of Techcrunch explains, “A Facebook user visits a third-party website, such as a travel site where they view prices for a hotel in Hawaii. That website drops a cookie on the user’s browser, and then hands a demand side platform (DSP) the complementary cookie. The DSP identifies the user to Facebook and tells it it wants to advertise to them the next time they visit Facebook.

The user visits Facebook, which pings the DSP asking for a real-time bid for how much they’d pay per impression to show that user a Facebook sidebar ad. If the bid is high enough, the ad gets shown, Facebook charges the DSP, and the DSP charges the website owner.”

This retargeting solution could potentially be a huge opportunity for advertisers. If it yields similar returns to what our experience has been with Google Retargeting, then this could be the ad revenue stream Facebook is in need of.

Facebook continues to test new ad methods with questionable success (from the users’ perspective). This could be a winner though. Would users feel the ads are more relevant therefore potentially more useful?

Is Facebook retargeting the ad type that may draw the clicks at the cost advertisers are looking for?

Like this post? Connect with Erika Barbosa on Google+.

Image credit: oparrish

Facebook Tests Even More Intrusive Ads

Facebook has announced that it is starting a very small test for promoted news feed posts. These ads will allow brands to advertise to “non-fans” in their news feed. This may apply to both the desktop and mobile.

The ads will be elegantly masked as typical page post ads with a small “sponsored” label in the bottom right corner. The recipient of the ad will also have the option to “like” the brand’s Facebook page directly from the ad.

Mashable provides the following example of what the news feed ads will look like:

As an advertiser, this could be an awesome advantage for your brand to reach a larger audience. You will no longer be limited to advertising to just your fans, but your entire target market in Facebook.

For the user, it’s a completely different story. This could be even more intrusive than all of the ads you are currently bombarded with. It will just be another addition to the already cluttered news feed.

But, we must keep in mind that Facebook is a free service and at the end of the day, it’s still a business.

Tell us your initial thoughts about news feed ads in the comments below.

Like this post? Connect with Erika Barbosa on Google+.

Image credit: Horia Varlan

83 Million Facebook Profiles Not Real

Facebook recently admitted that more than 8.7% of its 955 million Facebook accounts worldwide are fakes. That equals roughly 83 million profiles that are not real. Facebook broke the numbers down even further stating that the largest portion of the faux pie comes from 46 million duplicate accounts, or 4.8% of all accounts. Duplicate accounts are defined by Facebook as “an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account.”

The next biggest portion includes user-misclassified profiles, which are personal profiles that have been created for companies, instead of pages, or for a non-human entity, such as a pet. Yes, people have Facebook profiles for their pets. (Teaching the pet to maintain his own account would be a great trick)! These make up 2.4% or 23 million of the fake accounts. The remainder is made up of undesirable profiles, which are considered to be in breach of Facebook’s terms & conditions, and these number about 14 million.

The biggest issue here for Facebook is the effect this news will have on its advertisers and, subsequently, its stock price. It doesn’t help that earlier this month, software startup Limited Run claimed that 80% of the clicks on their Facebook ads were coming from bots. Tech Crunch did some of its own investigating and was skeptical about the timing of the announcement. Limited Run’s co-founder, Tom Mango, said the research was done earlier this year, but the company waited to post the results of their own testing until just after the launch of their new website. At any rate, Mango made it clear that they are not saying Facebook is behind the bots that are inflating the number of clicks – other factors, such as a vicious competitor could also be behind it.

Limited Run has certainly gotten Facebook’s attention and the social networking company says it’s investigating the claims. In the meantime, Facebook CFO David Ebersman said that Facebook is doing everything it can to ensure that Facebook is populated by real people. Does this change the way you use Facebook advertising? 

Image credit: davedehetre

Free Resources: New Facebook for Business Site

Today I’m stepping away from Google+ (although not for very long) to take a look at what Facebook for Business has been up to. Facebook recently released the Facebook for Business site which Mashable reports, “provides step-by-step guidance for how to best use Facebook’s marketing tools,” a Facebook company rep says.


Although the site is geared more for those starting out with their Facebook for Business strategy, the site does offer free resources that are worth a read even if just to brush up on best practices for Facebook Pages and Ads.

Below are a handful of resources I collected from the website:

Best Practices Guide: Marketing on Facebook

Building Your Business with Facebook Pages

Sponsored Stories for Premium and Marketplace

Did you find these resources or the website helpful?

We’ve Got New Facebook Ad Types

Facebook has done it again. They’re adding new features so fast it’s starting to become difficult to keep up. What is the latest and greatest from Facebook you ask? Get ready because the two new ad types they rolled out, simply put are - “bad ass”. Each time Facebook updates its advertising they make Google advertising look plain old boring and less effective.

When you log into Facebook advertising, right away you will notice a couple of changes. Now you have an option to choose the type of ad you want. Your choices are “Sponsored Stories” and “Facebook Ads”. The first option “Sponsored Stories” is new. “Facebook Ads”, the second option, is the original ad choice.

“Sponsored Stories” compared to your typical “Facebook Ads” will give you distribution for the News Feed stories published about your Page, Place or App, as well as fans who like your page. You can choose from two different types of Sponsored Stories.

The first type is called “Page Like Story”. When people Like your Page, their friends see a story about it. This is an effective tactic to promote fan building. The below highlight of the ad shows my friends that I Liked the page; there is nothing better than getting a recommendation from a friend.












The second type of ad is called “Page Post Story”. When you post an update to your Page, your fans see a story about it. This is a great way to advertise a new product or promotion. The average Facebook user has almost 200 friends and this does not even count all the pages they “Like”. If you are a brand posting a new advertisement on your wall, it’s very likely to be missed on your fans’ walls. There simply is too much information being posted on their walls.

For an example, I created a status update that reads, “This is a status update to show the new ad type,” to illustrate how it would appear on this type of ad. The only drawback is when you make the next status update it will change the ad as you cannot specify one status update to always be shown.










Have fun using the new ad types in your campaigns. Let me know how successful they are for you. I will be doing a follow-up post once I have some measurable data of how successful the campaigns are. In the meantime, hold on because I have a feeling Facebook will be releasing many new advertising features in the very near future.

Facebook is Driving Ad Revenue, Are You?

In a recent eMarketer article about social network advertising to account for 10.8% of online market, this year U.S. marketers will spend $3.08 billion on social media advertising. To the average marketing analyst, that's not surprising. Social network advertising, especially on Facebook, has skyrocketed in the past year. More and more companies are jumping on the "social media bandwagon", and some brands on Facebook are doing a fantastic job at it.



Many brands want to know - what's in it for me? Let's take a look at the increasing growth in social network advertising over the years.



According to eMarketer, "Spending will be up 55% over the $1.99 billion advertisers devoted to social networks in 2010 and will rise by a further 27.7% next year to reach nearly $4 billion."

2011 and it's dramatic growth will bring social media advertising spend to 10% of the total U.S. dollars dished online. According to the eMarketer study, "Worldwide, where social network ad spending will rise 71.6% to $5.97 billion, that proportion will be somewhat lower, at 8.7%."

There is no doubt that 2010 was the year of Facebook. Did anyone hear of that little engine that could, The Social Network?

”2010 was the year that Facebook firmly established itself as a major force not only in social network advertising but all of online advertising,” said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson, author of the upcoming report “Worldwide Social Network Ad Spending: 2011 Outlook.” “In 2011, its global presence is something multinational advertisers can’t ignore.”

Want more proof of how powerful social networks are driving ad revenue? Go to http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008180.

Another Facebook Advertising Tip

Use CPM (cost per impression) to test your Facebook ads instead of CPC (cost per click). When testing your ads using CPC it diverts the focus from testing the actual ads to testing the landing page or pages. There will be plenty of time to test landing pages but right now we want to test which ads produce the lowest CPC.


Pay Per Click equals 1.08 USD per click


Pay Per Impressions equals 0.38 USD per thousand

Remember, using CPM to first test the ads, you can determine what the true CPC rate is based on the actual performance of the ads. Testing your ads this way requires a tad bit more effort but will pay back big time when you save some of your budget testing the ads.

InternetMarketingClub.org Presents Targeting 500 Million of Your Best Prospects – Best Practices for Facebook Advertising

Join Margie Schneider, VP Operations of TenGoldenRules.com, as she presents, “Targeting 500 Million of Your Best Prospects – Best Practices for Facebook Advertising”. This webinar will review best practices for advertising in Facebook using enhanced filtering. Learn how you can leverage the unique advertisement features Facebook offers to reach your desired audience.

This presentation will explain the following topics:

• How to Successfully Set Up Facebook Campaigns
• Proven Methods for Using Facebook Filters
• Advanced Campaign Filtering Strategies
• Best Practices for Testing Ads
• Tactics for Gaining "Likes" and Reaching "Friends"
• Understanding Facebook FBML Landing Pages vs Website Landing Pages

This free webinar will take place Wednesday, August 18, 2010 12:30pmEST – 1:30pmEST. To register and for more information please visit: Targeting 500 Million of Your Best Prospects – Best Practices for Facebook Advertising

Facebook Connection Targeting

Looking for a creative way to increase your conversion rate in your Facebook PPC campaigns? Here’s a quick tip on using the connections filter.

One of the three types of connections you can target is, “friends of people who are already fans”. As a result, the ad will show up with an endorsement from your friend, incredible right? You will not find a more powerful type of ad in Facebook’s arsenal. I’ve included an example of what the ad would look like below and yes I’m a fan of the Captain.

If you decide to try this type of ad let me know how your connection targeting goes.

Laser Beam Targeting with Facebook Ads

To succeed in advertising on Facebook one has to take full advantage of the targeting system Facebook has developed for the advertiser. With over 350,000,000 active users the last thing you want to do is show your ad to the masses. Are you looking to advertise to people that are engaged? How about advertising to people whose birthday is today? “Keywords”, “Education”, and “Interested in” are all possible targets for your ads. Facebook actually has 11 targeting factors and with these the possibilities are endless to your target audience.

Let’s take a look at each of them now:

1. Location - Target by country, state/province, city, and metropolitan areas. You are required to have a location selected to advertise on Facebook.

2. Age - Age is a standard demographic factor.

3. Birthday - This is one of Facebook’s newest advertising targeting filters and to me this is one of the coolest.

4. Sex - Gender is a standard demographic factor.

5. Keywords - Keywords will are based on a user’s profile information including Activities, Interests, Favorite Books, TV Shows, Movies, About Me and more.

6. Education - Target based on level of education.

7. Workplaces - Target based on where they work.

8. Relationship – Single, In a Relationship, Engaged, It’s complicated, In an Open Relationship, and Widowed are all possible targets. Note: selecting any of these settings will remove all users that haven’t selected a relationship status in their profile.

9. Interested In - This factor is useful if a user’s preferences are relevant to whatever you are advertising.

10. Languages – Another standard demographic factor.

11. Connections - The connections fields enable you to include and exclude users based on pages, events, and applications that the users are members of.

If you use the targeting factors correctly it will increase your chances of finding success with your Facebook ad campaign. Remember to use multiple ads and to test, test, and then test some more.

Free Samples as an Ad Format Debuts on Facebook

Facebook advertising is pretty useful, and if you're a company that can offer something to your Facebook fans, it is even more useful and not to mention, beneficial. Chick-fil-A got some buzz this week for offering free samples through Facebook. The ad offered a voucher for a free breakfast biscuit, and all you had to do was fill out your mailing address. The information that Chick-fil-A gets goes only to them, and not Facebook. Once you filled out your mailing address, you can even allow friends to see you got a free sample voucher, which spreads the word.

I think this type of Facebook ad is great, and you really can't go wrong with giving free samples. It does benefit to become fans of your favorite brands because you never know when they'll start giving free stuff!