I noticed today that Facebook is showing an interactive widget that shows my campaign activity for my Facebook Ads. It shows a top level view of how many adverts you have, how many campaigns and even how many page likes your campaigns are producing.
You can click through on the different stats to take you through to the Adverts Manager dashboard. It’s a nice simplified reporting platform but possible suited more towards smaller campaigns.
Facebook has started pushing out organic messaging to those who engage with shared content in what looks a strong attempt increase the audience of fan pages. Once you like the shared content you are encouraged with a message “Want to see more from The Sun” along with a someone intrusive popup highlighting the “Like Page” button. Looking at the source code it doesn’t appear to be an FB ad but is it a new item just for media partners as we haven’t seen it on other content we liked.
This post follows on from a in-depth discussion by AJ Kohn on Google+ about Amit Agarwal’s interesting post on how to be more effective at posting links on Facebook. The idea is that Facebook’s edgerank algorithm gives favour to content that has higher engagement and which self-reinforces the likelihood that your content will continue appearing in your fan’s news feeds.
AJ Kohn’s view was that thought behind smarter posting of links by using full size photos could also apply to Google+ and not just Facebook.
Some of the Google+ discussion seemed to resolve around websites not correctly using meta data and would require some extra effort to post a full size photo + link instead of just the standard thumb nail and description. Part of the issue also relates to the need for users to have to visit the website, download a suitable image, upload it to Facebook/Google+ and then post a description a link back to the post. So the question seemed to be posted by many is why the hell should I bother, who is actually going to really care or benefit?
Can we influence the CTR?
Some of the discussion was also around does how the use of a combined large image/link could change the likelihood that viewers would click the link. Many people felt that it would not make a huge amount of difference compared to the extra effort required to post an image, description and a link manually. The change for desktop users is only minor but based on past experience I know full sized photos typically outperform thumbnail size images, I had initially assumed the CTR of the link within the description would have a lower CTR because people may not noticed the hyperlink within the text.
The Facebook Experiment on CTR
I had decided this could be fairly successfully tested using Facebook Ads which allows for 3 variations and a control test (automatic import). I wanted to test buying traffic based on the same demographic and test both how each post performed as a Sponsored Post but also how visitors might engage with the post. I picked a post I wrote last month on Brand Yourself but also created 4 new posts and backdated them so they shouldn’t have shown in any existing fans timelines which might influence my test.
Logo Trial Ad
Post Variation 1 – I selected a logo image to see how people respond to a very generic image that looks more like a standard ad but also because company logos are often the default image that are automatically imported. I would think carefully if you have the same generic logo for all your posts if people are sharing them on social media as you might be underselling your content.
Photo Trial Ad
Post Variation 2 - I also wanted to test the main idea of how a photo might perform so I picked a relevant image from the blog post and added a text link into the description. You can see that it also has the greatest visual impact but it’s also is the one that requires the most “effort” to add to a Facebook post. It’s the one that looks the best and takes up the most screen real estate meaning it’s more likely to get noticed by fans and receive some engagement via shares/likes/comments.
Text Trial Ad
Post Variation 3 - To ensure there was some level of control I picked the most boring option and removing the image as there are more than a few websites that have not correctly setup the meta data or even include an image in their post that Facebook/Google+ can automatically associate with the post.
Thumbnail Trial Ad
Post Variation 4 - This is the default type of post when you are using a RSS feed such as Network Blogs to automatically post to your page or just posting a link and letting Facebook/Google+ grab an image from the post. This is the standard option for posting to Facebook and the simple option most people select when sharing content.
How did each post perform as a Facebook Ad?
The only caveat was I had to increase the bid rates on some of the posts to get a decent reach to capture some clicks. The problem is that some ads got more clicks but they all had the same $10 budget to get as many clicks as possible within 48 hours. There was also no special Facebook functionality used such as target fans who are more likely to engage, it was a stock standard targeted campaign based on existing proven demographic targeting options I have used to grow my Facebook fans previously. The other point is that this test is more about how people engage with the post not about how successful the Facebook ads were in buying test traffic. With a larger scale test and budget, and spending the exact same amount for each ad type it might be possible to try and reduce the skew of such a low data set but are you offering to foot the bill? We are going to work with the data that we have for this test and see does it present any interest trends that suggest further testing could be done in the future…
Campaign Reach: 1,307
Actions:1
Clicks:10
CTR on Ad: 0.244%
CPC: $0.55
Post Variation 1 - This ad above performed horribly based on CTR, CPC and Actions (Engagement) but it got the greatest reach due to the higher CPC I had to bid to get clicks. It also would likely not work as well unless you had a strong brand logo in the post and might confuse fans if you are using logo as the image by default for every post.
Campaign Reach: 588
Actions: 15
Clicks:23
CTR on Ad: 2.614%
CPC: $0.24
Post Variation 2 - This ad above out performed the others by a large margin, with a substantially lower CPC to run the ad, a huge CTR compared to the other ads, and the largest number of Actions & Clicks of any of the Facebook sponsored posts. The use of a large photo and description would be our suggested best practice if you are running using Facebook ads to promote your posts.
Campaign Reach: 995
Actions: 1
Clicks: 10
CTR on Ad: 0.652%
CPC: $0.39
Post Variation 3 - The ad above didn’t actually perform as badly as I expected with a reasonable CTR and better CPC than the logo ad but the Actions (Engagement) recorded sucked. I think from the branding point of view it also performed badly considering the ad copy is fairly enticing to the demographic audience being targeting by the ads. I would not advise posting straight text links without any visual elements if you want to use them for Facebook ads.
Campaign Reach: 797
Actions: 3
Clicks: 12
CTR on Ad: 0.798%
CPC: $0.39
Post Variation 4 - The final ad above is the stranded automatic import option if you post a link into Facebook and let Facebook do it’s own thing and import thumbnail,image and description. The CTR and Actions (Engagement) was higher than the standard text link but the CPC was exactly the same. I would advise to think twice about using the default import functionality if you are planning on running Facebook ads to promote these types of posts.
How did each post perform based on engagement & click-thru-rate?
The sponsored stories drive the visitors to the one of four posts that I was using for this test, each post had their own unique Google Campaign URL so I could measure the actual CTR to the website. I had initially planned on using Bit.ly to track clicks but last minute decided not to use Bit.ly as I wanted to reduce the complexity of the experiment and keep it simple as possible and short URLs can influence CTRs.
CTR on Link: 16.6%
Pages/Visit: 1
Avg Visit Duration: 0:00
Bounce Rate: 100%
Post Variation 1 – The first post with the company logo talked about in the post had a fairly disappointing engagement and based on the small data test a bad choice for future posts. This type of post showed the lowest CTR of any of the tests with 16.6% but could also be a sign that this one needed more test data.
CTR on Link: 39.13%
Pages/Visit: 1.44
Avg Visit Duration: 1:19:29
Bounce Rate: 55.56%
Post Variation 2 – The post option that took the most effort actually showed insanely higher engagement based on CTR, Pages Visited and Bounce Rate. The average visit duration seems slightly skewed so needs further data to confirm how this post may lift time on site. This type of post showed a massive 39.13% CTR from Facebook to the actual post, but more data would be great to confirm if these statistics stay constant.
CTR on Link: 20%
Pages/Visit: 1
Avg Visit Duration: 0:00
Bounce Rate: 100%
Post Variation 3 – The plain text post where we removed the image thumbnail also showed that it performed terribly with a very low level of engagement and only a 20% CTR to the blog post from Facebook. I also think this needs more data to confirm this remains constantly low.
CTR on Link: 40%
Pages/Visit: 1.25
Avg Visit Duration: 1:10
Bounce Rate: 75%
Post Variation 4 – It’s interesting the the default Facebook option actually has nearly the same CTR to the blog posts as the large photo posts, but the engagement figures are slightly lower. I think this one also needs more data to see how Pages/Visited, Time on Site and Bounce rate might change with more visitor data.
Posting Link Insights Learned?
I certainly think there is a good base experiment and I have thought about 2-3 followup experiments that I would like to run based on the images used, impact of URL shortners, and does the content in the description make any difference. Based on my data I would say there is a good insight that using full size photos and adding text with a link is far better option the relying on the automatic import or posting straight links without any visual elements.
Has Facebook started the process of rolling out an invite only program for a new type of ad that has a static “like” button similar to websites and no other ads showing at the same time.
Yahoo has today rolled out an updated to their Buzz platform that put’s it far ahead of Google Trends and Google Real-time and the usability places it in the grasp of being useful to everyone who is able to operate a mouse. I really love the potential power of the platform combined with its pure simplicity with huge vaults of almost real-time demographic data and is large enough that I can see what users in Queensland, Australia are looking putting it on par with many enterprise social media platforms.
The platform is very much pitched around what celebrities get the most buzz but I see the platform has some very powerful features outside the paparazzi knowing who to stalk online for the next high of traffic to their fashion blogs. If you are involved in marketing or search you should be testing some of your primary keywords to see what insights you can learn and measure this against your Facebook fan page analytic data to gauge the variance in the data, but I can tell you damn it’s cool!
What it Yahoo Clues tells you
Melbourne Most Popular City Search Queries
Yahoo SEO Trends
SEO versus PPC Traffic
See Yahoo Clues in Action!
I did a video review of the platform and how you can use Top Trends & Trends Analysis for your keyword or article research, but also so you know more about your Facebook demographic before you start targeting them via Facebook Ads, please check it out below and then go and play with it for yourself.
Today I noticed while looking at the data from some current Facebook ad campaigns that there was a notification at the top of the page but also a new link to a feature called “creative library”. The notification was an update to Facebook Ads Manager interface with new enhanced visuals and new campaign performance data, my account had been upgraded to take advantage of the new advanced metrics and graphs to better understand my Facebook Ads.
There was a link to a pdf document to learn more about the new Facebook Ad Manager that offered a brief tour of the new features including
Click to view the PDF Guide to the New Facebook Ads Manager
The new updates highlighted that you can see an audience performance graph that show you how many people your Facebook ads do reach compared to the total audience you can target over the last 28 days. This is important as it can show what elements of your campaign are under delivering and guides on where you can improve your campaign to reach more of your audience including more social reach or increasing your CPC bids or campaign budgets.
The new metrics are also constantly updated so offer almost real-time results of your campaign providing you campaign metrics to understand how Facebook users are responding to your campaigns, and adjust them constantly. The metrics have almost been simplified as there is now clicks and connections (conversions) which enable advertisers to understand if they are failing to target the right audience by not getting any new fans, app installations, or RSVPs to your events. You can quickly also divide the number of connections into number of clicks to get the campaign conversion rate which helps spot potential failing campaigns quickly.
The new Facebook ad campaign metrics are
Facebook introduces inline ad management
One of the issues with the previous interface was the time wasted loading when clicking back and forward to manage your individual Facebook ads. Now you can quickly click one of the ad rows in your Ad Manager screen and the ad will drop down allowing you to quickly preview the ad and click-through the various elements of its individual performance without leaving the Ad manager.
Facebook offers Creative library
Similar to a number of bid management and ad serving platforms Facebook has created a central database of all your campaign creatives allowing for scalable campaigns and also the re-use of previous ads in your new campaigns. The platform allows you to view all campaigns creatives, by campaign but also those campaigns with no adverts yet created, and you can also search via keyword to quickly find that perfect ad. There is 3 options you can edit that creative, preview how it will look on your profile page and click to use that creative in a new or existing campaign.
Facebook will be releasing the new Ads Manager to all advertisers by the 25th May 2011, so keep an eye out in your account for the new dashboard.
Facebook has today rolled out a new feature which allows advertisers to broaden the target age range automatically with its broad age match setting. The move which will increase the clicks and impressions your campaign receives but will also benefit Facebook with an increase in ad space being sold outside the key demographics. The basis for the change is that Facebook claims if you are to target 24-35 then someone who is 36 might be just as interested in your advert and possibly be as valuable as someone who is 35. While this might in part true if someone has just had a birthday or lies about their age on their Facebook profile but it may also cloud your analysis of your campaigns if you focus on demographics.
Does Broad Match offers move value?
The good news was sent out via Facebook’s Ad newsletter that finally some of the features advertisers take for granted on other platforms such as Microsoft adCentre or Google AdWords are slowly being rolled out on Facebook Ads. The first is allowing multiple users to access your Facebook ads account via the permission tool you can give the ability for others to manage your account on your behalf. The general user can accomplish tasks such as improving quality of campaigns and performance of your ads or just monitoring the results of your ad campaign via the reports only setting. The add user setting is fairly easy to find but still requires a little digging to find, shown below.
Sorry to say for those who live in Argentina, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Chile, France, Japan or the Netherlands, but your Father’s day was last weekend the 20th June. The reason for the confusion is that some advertisers may not have noticed or are trying to wring every last drop of value of the event. It is fairly common to see campaigns that run past their due date over long holidays such as Christmas but it is not acceptable for business to continue to be so lazy.
Some advertisers or marketers may argue that there is a spill over after big events and they can capture this traffic now much cheaper because there is no competition. While this is a fair argument for events like Mayday Sales, Black Friday or Boxing Day sales, you can see from the Google search trends data below that it’s almost zero. So paying to expose your brand to zero search traffic usually means zero sales but if you have statistics please tell me I’m wrong!
After 21st June there is almost zero web search interest in Father’s Day
I have updated the campaign tracking code to remind whoever is looking at the Google Analytics data that it’s no longer Father’s Day so feel free to click the image below to ensure there is enough traffic captured in the analytics reports. The new campaign they will be tracking from this page is “Not Fathers Day” which should set off some alarm bells if anyone is running their campaigns and actually checking the data.
Please click the image above
While its wonderful to see a company like Bonobos running Facebook ads and also using Google Analytics campaign tagging on the URLs the issue is why wasn’t the extra step taken to ensure the campaign would stop running on Monday the 21st June? It can happen that not all the campaign budget is spent so agencies continue the campaign at the request of the client or on their on behalf but if they took just 30 seconds to add in a new creative I wouldn’t be writing this blog post.
Google AdWords
Just a note that this is not specific to Bonobos or Facebook, a simple search on Google for “Father’s Day” showed a number of ads for campaigns targeting the event. It is possible that some of these domains might be still running on Google Grant money but they still should be ensuring they are getting value for their clicks and donations for their organisations. It would be smarter to run a new campaign “Forget Father’s Day?” you can still make it up to him with a donation!
Disclosure: Facebook and Google offer a feature to stop campaigns on a certain date as shown below
Facebook Ads Campaign Settings
Adwords Campaign Management Settings
Time Required: 30-45 seconds estimated including login time
So this is a reminder that it’s not really that hard to set up a campaign to run leading up to a specific event or day, but its even easier to stop that running once the day has passed and you won’t waste your money communicating to your audience that you are out of touch and don’t know what day of the week it is….
Yesterday AOL rolled out the heavy guns in display platforms with its new AD Desk system designed for Advertising.com and allows for direct access to AOL’s premium audiences. Being a new platform it contains a number of new technologies and data insights unique to AOL properties and its Advertising.com display network. The new advertising platform advises that you can now have the keys to the most powerful advertising platform, but is the Advertising.com & AOL Network enough?
According to Google’s Ad Planner the 48 primary placement websites have around 99,000,000 unique visitors with a reach of around 39.6% of the US market with around 8,600,000,000 page views which does seem to show that AOL’s Ad network does have a significant scale. Some of the many Advertising.com sites you can target with AD Desk include a number of well know sites including those run by competitors such as Microsoft:
AOL.comSo who is AdDesk built for?
It is being pitched as built by advertisers for advertisers and AOL has been actively prospecting for new clients over the past few months to join the alpha test that helped form the product and what features it would include once it was released to a broader market. The AOL AdDesk seeks to follow Google’s lead in providing more transparency for advertisers and more control over their display ads as it is rumored to provide a vast amount of proprietary AOL data to better self-manage your campaigns.
The solution appears to try and solve both agencies and advertisers issues within a bid management style interface, so the question that needs to be asked will the other rumors hold true and will it support multiple platforms such as Bing & Google in the next version?
What are the AOL AdDesk features?
What are the AOL AdDesk sales pitches?
So where does AdDesk Fail?
The point around such a make or break product, you would assume that AOL would have secured any similar domains such as “TheAdDesk.com”, but it failed and this site currently flagged as having Malware is likely getting a large spike in visitors. The other issue is that there are 2 other established websites already offering a product called AdDesk which currently outranks the new AOL AdDesk product, along with a number of blog articles about its product.
Naples News Media Group – AdDesk
The important part is that it seems a wonderful product but some of the steps could make the rollout easier and is likely to less confuse agencies and advertisers who go looking for the product but find two competitors products which appear to do a similar task. With so much money on the line in making this product a success AOL should be more proactive securing domains and also examine the financials behind buying the Trademarks/licence of the competitors and close down their product or have it renamed.
You can always create an account with Advertising.com AdDesk and test the software for yourself, but since its a beta test their might be a delay in approval…
Google Adsense has moved towards a dominate position with its expanded support for trusted third-party networks to use its Adsense platform but its latest ad was game changing. Google has always run a walled garden around its ad networks but as more features and technology are imported from DoubleClick such as a more powerful Small Business Ad Manager it looks promising for advertisers.
Google has started heavily promoting the external Google certified ad networks will start to appear on Adsense pages, with a promise of increased earnings for its Adsense partners. The inclusion of a advertiser like Facebook is likely to accelerate the adoption of the Google Adsense network as a defacto standard for publishers.
If you want to learn more about what is a Google certified ad network check out the YouTube clip below.
The Facebook connect ad I saw was running on my Ideal Marketing blog and shows a sponsored placement of Facebook Connect, promoting KISSmetrics Facebook fanpage. The placement was quite relevant and also stood out from the typical ads and the nature of the ad made it appear much more interactive and more likely to be clicked.
The fact that the Facecook ad has a better call to action, means that advertisers get more clicks and those websites running Google Adsense get much more revenue for their content. But the question is now will websites remove the static Facebook links and replace them with Adsense in the hope of receiving Facebook placements? Also does this mean that more Facebook features and technology will begin to populate Google Adsense ads or is this just a test?
It is now clear how this will impact on Microsoft PubCenter beta network, which is slowly expanding in reach and websites included in its content network but it might have to move quicker.
Google Map’s has showed the power of Facebook ads as its new real estate product has moved aggressively into expanding its market share by utilising Facebook Advertising to reach its target market in Australia.
I noticed tonight a new campaign was reaching out to my demographics to try and encourage us to try Google Maps to find a new home. The ad message and graphic is not exactly groundbreaking or likely to lead to an exodus but may lead consumers to change how they search for realestate from social media.
Judging by the Facebook campaign messages and the landing page it seems that it is very early in the process and will likely start a new advertising war with existing real estate players who have typically avoided social media ads until now.
Even the interface for Google Maps does not come close to existing leading realestate sites, but does seem to allow a offer channel for those using social media to consider a new option. The basic Google Maps realestate interface is shown below.
The next steps would be to see how other Realestate groups meet this direct challenge for eyeballs as typically Facebook advertising offers much lower CPC. So while many in the industry will hope that this as just a test this one-off test but based on Google’s previous behaviour it is likely that Google will gather some more data and aggressively expand its social media marketing.
There has been recent an increase in discussions around the profitability of Facebook and how its App developers seem to have a larger share of this cake due to not having total control of its app payment platform. So is it too early for Facebook to back-flip on its promise to make its platform free for developers to generate revenue from advertising or transactions that they control.
One of the suggested methods is a halfway solution which allows developers to choose between third party currency or Facebook credits.
But this halfway solution means that the switch to a pure Facebook currency may experience delays and may never reach true scale required to compete with Paypal or Google Checkout to be a true alternative.
While I can see the complex situation that Facebook have with their developers, it is unlikely that the developers would walk away from Facebook as its a successful platform. But the move towards a formal payment platform does require formal relationships between developers and Facebook which should help build formal development partnerships.
It is likely that Facebook will follow the successful Apple App store integration which requires more control of the approval process and can skew the application towards Facebook’s requests. The biggest point is that it will improve the quality of applications being released and should reduce the instances of fraudulent or spam applications being released. It will remove the issue of Facebook of having to enforce its rules after the damage has been done they can prevent the damage before it affects their users.
It’s initial solution seems to be Facebook Verified Application which was launched in May 2009 with around 120 apps listed.
How Facebook defines a “Verified Application”
Verified applications have passed a detailed Facebook review to confirm that the user experience they provide complies with Facebook policies. Verified applications have committed to be transparent about how they work and will respect you and your friends when they send communication on your behalf.
Because these applications have passed a review by Facebook, they are prioritized higher in the application directory and are highlighted by a green checkmark. A “Verified Apps” badge will appear on their Profile Pages as well.
What are some verified applications?
Some of the leading Facebook Apps have been Facebook verified applications that have already begun using Facebook credits for virtual payments. It is interesting mix of suppliers and application types that are being test.
The biggest advantage is that this move towards a standard Facebook currency and potential exchange rate is that it brings liquidity and scale to Facebook credits. The current exchange rate is a fixed rate of UDS$1 = 10 FBC which was a slight discount to the initial UDS$1 = 100 FBC when it was originally launched.
As in most virtual currencies the biggest issue is costs for processing and conversions so scale is important. If Facebook is to scale up its Facebook Currency they must also examine how to keep its value stable but also allow developers to convert it back to real currency.
So how much money is at risk?
According to a recent E-Consultancy article Zynga is the top game business on Facebook, pulling in more revenue than the next three top earners: Playfish, Rockyou, Causes.
Zynga applications are reportedly making $500,000 a day on Facebook and in turn Zynga is spending a reported $137,000 on Facebook ads daily, according to All Facebook. This $363,000 daily profit makes for a very good relationship with Facebook. If Facebook was smart they would allow Facebook Credits to be also used for its Facebook Ads platform. This is more suitable for its larger application developers and this also allows for it to reduce the amount of costs for processing transactions but also keeps money within its platform.
So its likely that Facebook could choose to target just its new application developers but would likely need to start to move some of its bigger partners onto its payment platform if they are to be successful at expanding it.
