The Bottom Line: Facebook Ads are the most versatile, targeted way to advertise online, and they have incredible reach.

Challenges with Facebook Advertising

• Banner Blindness
• You have to hire a graphic artist to make all the ad creatives

Facebook Glossary:

• Connections: The number of individuals who liked your Facebook page, RSVP’d to your event, or installed your app within 24 hours of seeing your ad or sponsored story. Basically, a connection is a conversion.
• Unique Reach: The number of individual people who saw your sponsored stories or ads.
• Social Reach: The number of people who saw your sponsored stories or ads because their friends liked your page, RSVP’d to your event, or used your app.
• Frequency: The average number of times each person saw your campaign’s sponsored story or ad. This is helpful for measuring ad fatigue.

Basic Ad Formats

• Basic Ads
  • “Like” ad: Links to tab on Facebook page
  • Event ad: Links to event
  • Application ad: Links to application
  • Standard ad: Links to specific URL
  • Sponsored Stories
    • Page “Like” Story: Mary-Jane likes your page, Page “like” Story lets Mary-Jane’s friends know about the like
    • Page Post Story: You published a post to your page’s fans. Page Post Story allows this post to show up in fans’ news feeds
    • Pages Post “Like” Story; Alex liked one of your page posts in the last 7 days. Page Post “like” Story lets Alex’s friends know about the post like
    • App Used and Game Played Story: Lauren played/used your game or app. App Used/Game Played Story tells her friends about this action
    • App Share Story: Hayes shared a story from your app in the last 7 Days. App Share Story lets Hayes’ friends know about the share
    • Check-in Story: Lisa checked in or claimed a deal using Facebook Places. Check-in Story lets Lisa’s friends know about it.
    • Domain Story: Mike liked/shared content from your website or pasted a link from your site to his wall. Domain Story lets Mike’s friends know about this action.

The complexity and potential of targeting on Facebook

• There are so many ways of targeting that it can be confusing
  • Age, likes, interests, birthday, apps, education, timeline content, friends, event RSVPs, fans
  • When choosing targets, focus on two things:
    • Narrowing your audience
      • Demo and Geo Targeting
        • Geography: Country, State, Province, City or Zip targeting
        • Demographics: Gender, Age, Birthday, Relationship Status, Language
        • Workplace and Education Targeting
          • Workplace, Education, Preferred Language
        • Likes and Interests Targeting
          • Favorite TV Shows, Movies, Books, Music, Hobbies, Religion, Political Views
• Thinking outside the box – Let’s say you want to sell golf clubs
  • Nick (who plays golf) is an obvious target
  • Barbara doesn’t like golf – but she likes the Palm Beach Country Club
  • Chaz doesn’t have the word golf anywhere on his profile, but he plays golf for a living: he’s a sales guy!
  • Try the obvious targets, but Facebook’s best advertisers use non-linear thinking to target ads.

Campaign Organization Tips

• An “Account” in Facebook is similar to a “Campaign” in Paid Search
• A “Campaign” in Facebook is similar to “Ad Group” in Paid Search
• Warning: Don’t create campaigns with many different targets and ads. Keep your campaigns small.
• Do not put all segmented target groups in one campaign – as your ads are competing within the campaign.
• Prevent ad fatigue, or banner blindness by changing ads frequently
  • As soon as CTR trends down, submit new content!

Q&A:

What is a good CTR?

• Anywhere from 0.1-0.4 is really strong CTR, even .08% is okay
• Dennis Yu, CEO at BlitzLocal outlines 11 Killer Ways to Increase Your Facebook CTR

What images work best?

• Logos traditionally don’t work well
• Images of people are effective
• Format design keeping small size in account

What is a preferred or optimal frequency?

• Keep it small!
• 6,7,8 is bad

Any issues with click fraud?

• There is a department at Facebook dedicated to click fraud with a sophisticated monitoring team.
• More difficult to produce in Facebook than in search where you can just search to make a specific ad appear.

How will timeline affect ads/business pages?

• Yet to be determined!

Fans much more likely to take some type of action than non-fans.

Targeting workplaces is a great tool for B2B marketing.

What sort of company uses page post story? How breaking should the news be? What types of posts work best?

• Entertainment, news businesses using these most effectively
• Have emotional connection so people will click

Is there advertising on Facebook mobile?

• In testing, not released to general public yet.

Notes taken by BlitzLocal Analyst Matt Prater

Graphics obtained from: http://www.slideshare.net/TradaPaidSearch/facebook-ads-you-can-make-them-work and www.facebook.com.

Original at “Facebook Ads: You Can Make Them Work!” Webinar by Trada BlitzLocal

Depending on the term, it could be 90%+ of these searches not being relevant, and at $5-10 a click, that’s a lot of irrelevant clicks to pay for to find a winner, even if that winner will pay you $10,000 for a new website.

The biggest problem with B2B is that when someone types in “dentist”, you don’t know if they are a dentist or if they are looking for a dentist.

The die-hard PPC folks will argue that you’re just not choosing the right keywords (go for more specific terms), don’t have enough negative keywords (exclude anyone searching with city terms—since these are likely consumers), or you’re not writing specific enough ad copy (supposedly, consumer won’t click on your ad if your title is “Hey Dentists!”) While these comebacks are true, they are missing the big point.

In B2B marketing, you must target WHO the user is, not WHAT they are searching on.

In search, you don’t know who the user is, but you have a clue by the nature of their search terms. In social, you know WHO the user is and you’re catching them before they search.

STEP 1: Isolate the Target

So while you can get a ton of consumer traffic by targeting “dentist” in Google, when you interest target “dentist” on Facebook, you’re targeting by job title and profession.  Try it. In fact, try a number of job titles and see just how many chiropractors, teachers, plumbers, administrative assistants, and marketing managers there are out there.

Voila!  Now you’ve pinpointed all the dentists, dental assistants, students studying to be dentists, retired dentists, and folks who have a dentist fetish—all of them on Facebook. Now narrow down to the specific target you want by age, location or even specialty—maybe you want to talk to just cosmetic dentists in California.

Add in lateral targets—magazines they read, associations they’re a part of, and so forth.  You can read more about micro-targeting here.

STEP 2: Get Your Testimonials and Trust Signals

You probably thought I’d next talk about ads, which is what most people do.  Nope, in social people don’t search—they are interrupted with banner ads. You can focus on ad copy in Google PPC because people are actively looking. In Facebook, you have to gently nudge people to take a look at you and momentarily distract them from spying on their friends, or whatever they happen to be doing on Facebook.

So you need distraction-worthy content, which comes in the form of what their friends are doing. If that potential dentist client of yours is perusing through what her friends did yesterday, she might be persuaded to click on news where those very friends are talking about your business—maybe how they used your software to get more traffic to their website, streamline billing operations, etc.

When you have a TON of testimonials (across Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on), paired with content that you’ve published in major outlets, paired with positive things that other reputable organizations have said about you—then it’s more likely they are coming to you versus you coming to them. Some people call this “inbound” or “pull” marketing because you’re leveraging that prospective friends to do the selling for you. Because, despite your Harvard MBA and years of business experience; sorry Charlie, they trust what their friends have to say more.

Ideally, get this content to live on your website or Facebook page, although this is not completely necessary. Let’s say that you wrote some compelling article in an industry journal. Send ad traffic directly to that site so you can leverage their trust. If you wrote your article correctly, the by-line (about the author piece at the end) will have a line or two about what you do. And if you did a good job creating real value in that article, as opposed to selling, they’ll contact you. No need to scream at them or place popup windows in their path—they’ll find you.

Step 3: Turn Your Ads On 

You wouldn’t have a grand opening party without first making sure your place has plenty of food and drinks, right?  In the same way, make sure you have the compelling content from Step 2 before you start advertising. Otherwise, you’re just wasting money.

Take the interest targets that you set up in Step 1 and pair it against the content you have in Step 2.  Think about WHO you are talking to, not WHAT they might be searching on. For example, if they are a dental hygienist, what content is most compelling to them? What if they are a receptionist—what might they find interesting? You’ll find that you might not have super relevant content for everyone. That’s okay—you’re just testing at this stage. Later you can mix and match what combinations work best.

Note that this is NOT landing page optimization, which is more superficially about elements that comprise the landing page—the image, the size of the button, the headline, and so forth.  We’re talking about the whole lead gen. lifecycle—creating a clear path between the targets, what we say to them, and what we want them to do. That last piece is the landing page—to get them to call the phone number, fill out the form, watch the video, etc.

Step 4: Run the Math

Set your Facebook campaign budgets low, perhaps $10 a day. Use the default CPC bids, since you don’t need to get into the nuances of how bidding works—this is not Google. What you care about is your Cost Per Click and conversion rates.  CPC divided by conversion rate is your cost per lead, by the way.  We created a calculator for your use, in case you are rusty on first semester statistics:

This is B2B, so your cost per lead could be over $100. Maybe you’re at $2 a click and 1 in 50 clicks results in a phone call.  Maybe it’s a lot more because you’re selling something that costs thousands, so that a hundred dollars is an acceptable price. Or maybe you’re competing in New York City, where the price is exorbitant from all the advertisers that overlap one another from poor targeting.

Whatever the case, if you’re doing this on Facebook, you have to be prepared for seemingly negative ROI for the first few months.  Why? Because we are catching people well before they are searching, so it could be months before they want that new website, CEREC machine, billing system, or whatever it is you’re advertising. With Google, the conversion timeframe might be that same visit. This is unlikely in your case, unless your product is an impulse buy and also under $100.

Some final thoughts:

We are often asked a common set of questions, so let’s address some of them here:

How big should my interest target be? You don’t need a thousand ads—just a handful that target just the people that you want to hit. If your interest target is over 10,000 people, then either you’re doing something wrong or your audience is nationwide.

Do I need new landing pages for Facebook? Probably. Video is what converts nowadays, so you probably need to fix your other landing pages while you’re at it. Camera shy? They aren’t choosing you for your good looks, so get your Flip video, some good lighting, and film a 2 minute intro. Say what you’d say if that dentist was sitting right in your office—don’t be “fake” or talk like a newscaster.

Will BlitzLocal do this for me? Sure, if you have at least $10k to spend in fees, not counting advertising budget. If you’re a dentist, we require only $2k a month in total (labor plus ad spend), since we’re targeting just one region and because our dental campaigns can be replicated. If we have to build something that is not reusable across many clients, then we have to charge more for it. We are not the cheapest game in town.

Do you offer free articles and training?  I would love to use your service, but cannot afford it. Sure. Send a note to info@blitzlocal.com and we’ll send you some of our internal training materials. You can also post a question at facebook.com/blitzlocal, where others can see and benefit from what you ask.

 About the Author:

Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal, a Webtrends partner that builds social media dashboards to measure brand engagement and ROI, specializing in the intersection of Facebook and local advertising. You can reach him on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, his blog, or good old-fashioned email at dennis@blitzlocal.com. BlitzLocal is a leader in social and local advertising and analytics, creating mass micro-targeted campaigns. Mr. Yu is an internationally sought-after speaker and author on all things Facebook, and has been featured in National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, CBS Evening News, and other venues.

Original at Marketing B2B via Facebook: The Most Common Mistake You’re Probably Making BlitzLocal

The graveyard of failed startups is littered with the bodies of companies that have gone after the Microsofts, Cokes, and Proctor and Gambles of the world.  Why not? The reasoning is that just one Coke as a client can be worth 1,000 little clients, and is perhaps even enough to sustain your venture all by itself. Unfortunately, when you have one big customer that accounts for most of your earnings, they can also jerk you around; more on the “Wal-Mart” problem later.

Some people call this the problem of the elephants, deer, and rabbits.  It’s sexy to go elephant hunting, but the trouble is that it takes a team to kill the elephant. That team may have to wait for months on-end before getting anything; often starving in the process. It takes sophisticated tools and plenty of unpaid labor to get an initial meeting, much less deal with all the various levels of decision makers needed to get your first dollar.

Rabbits are small, plentiful, and easy to catch.  These are the small businesses that have $10 a month for your software, but can be such a pain to service that you get a case of “rabbit starvation”. Yes, it’s true; if you live in the woods and subside only on rabbit meat you will starve, since wild rabbit meat is so lean that it takes more energy to process than it’s worth.

So in true Goldilocks fashion, the rabbits are too small and the elephants are too big. And thus, startup advisors say, you should chase deer—medium sized, not too hard to catch, and enough meat to make it worthwhile.  Trying to serve the middle, however, is like trying to be everything to everyone. With no focus in the marketplace, you are unable to differentiate and unable to dominate a niche.

Back to “Paul” again; he has had minor success selling to elephants.  He is personally well networked, and one of the best salespeople I’ve ever met. But he is just one guy and there is only so many of him that can perform magic. It’s not scalable.  Further, the $10,000 proof-of-concept deals don’t seem to materialize into $100,000 deals, despite what the Excel spreadsheets to the board might represent.

He may have spent (gambled) $50,000 in energy to get the $10,000 deal. And the big brands that he’s dealing with know this full-well, and are happy to take advantage of the discounts their name can leverage. It’s like the prom queen that can be mean to the adolescent boys; teasing each of them into an endless stream of favors. And it is here that startups die.

In engineering projects, we know that you have to multiply the estimates by a factor of 3. If they say it will take 5 weeks, then you can assume 15 weeks is a more realistic estimate.   Same is true of sales. That deal that is 60% likely to close is actually 20% likely to close.  And instead of 2 weeks, it will be 2 months. You might be ready to go, but the main client contact may be slow to respond to email, the accounting people have some arduous PO process, or some new person wants to evaluate your software—starting the clock over.

Meanwhile, you’re burning cash.  It’s not like you can put payroll or your rent on hold. What you’ve expended so far is a sunken cost, so you just keep going like the gambler who bets double or nothing.  Even if you get the deal, you might not be paid until you complete the work, plus net 60.  So if the project takes 90 days to complete and you’re paid 60 days after completion, you have to float 150 days of cash.  If the pre-sales process took 90 days, you’re now looking at 240 days; not an uncommon cycle to close a big deal.

In those 240 days, anything can happen.  Facebook or Google comes out with a product or feature set that eliminates the need for your product. The company you’re dealing with has a re-organization, so your internal champion isn’t the decision maker anymore. Maybe you lost a key engineer—hey; lots of places are notorious for folks who are disloyal, jumping to whatever the sexy thing of the moment is. Your board or investor begins to pressure you, forcing you to spend more time on convincing them that you’re “so close” to hitting it big, while actually taking your focus away from execution.

Napoleon had his Waterloo because he overextended his supply chain. In other words; the clock ran out on him. If you’re going after the big boys, it’s easy to underestimate what it takes to win.  Mind you, self-service software is a different matter—we’re talking about selling deals to household brands that are used to dealing with big agencies who will roll out the red carpet with not a penny of cost on their side for months.

So here are some key insights to help you avoid a prolonged death—to have a decent shot at success versus running out of gas.

•       Law #1: Enterprise software is not bought, it is sold. Companies don’t just walk up to you and say they want to order the #2 meal, supersized.  Expressing interest after reading about you on TechCrunch is a long way from getting your first penny.  Enterprise software is sold via a network of experienced sales reps that have inside connections at the client company. That rep may have been an agency player with a big black book or someone who was internal until recently. If you don’t have teams of folks who can navigate these landmines, you’ll be constantly scratching your head as to why you got so close, but some inferior vendor won the day. You’re column fodder, buddy—the client was happy to waste your time to get you to fly in and pitch, just so they can say they talked to 3 other people before selecting the vendor they had in mind all along.  Moral of the story– don’t enter a battle that you haven’t already determined you’ve won via inside connections. In other words: never go into an RFP situation blind.        

•  Law #2: Ask for a token payment. Sure, you might be dealing with someone from General Motors. But does that person have power to sign a check? We no longer do custom work for free or do a ton of free consulting. If they want a proof of concept, we charge a nominal fee.  Even if it’s only asking for $1,000, the prospect’s reaction to this will be quite telling if they are serious. Case in point—one of the largest newspapers in the world wanted our help with Facebook marketing. They wanted every PowerPoint presentation we have ever done, some one-on-one meetings on-site, and some technical help to troubleshoot. We were flattered. But when we popped the question, they balked. I knew this person’s boss, who told me that this person was preparing a strategy to present as their own. This person was just swapping our name for his name and taking credit with no intention of engaging with us. It happens all the time. Watch for it now and you’ll see it often. A payment of a few thousand dollars is a gesture of good faith between both parties. And if you are looking at doing a partnership with a larger, more established company, be wary of “partners” that want you to take all the risk.
•       Law #3: Decide if you are positioning yourself as cheaper or better. You can’t be both. Even if you are, the marketplace won’t believe you. Plus, you’d be leaving money on the table if you can justify yourself as being of higher quality. Would you trust a heart surgeon that is offering surgeries this week at 50% off?
•       Law #4: Triple your prices. You’ll lose some customers, as you should. But the ones you lose are likely the ones that are causing you the most headaches which, in turn, prevent you from focusing on the guys that are happy to pay you more. Spend time on the customers who love you. Don’t abide by the squeaky wheel management philosophy. If you have 30 clients paying you $5k a month each on average, wouldn’t it be so much easier to have just 10 clients paying you $15k a month?
•       Law #5: Ignore the armchair quarterbacks. Often the most well-meaning of family and friends will insist on giving you advice.  While you trust their friendship, it doesn’t mean they can weigh-in on complex business decisions.  How much of your precious time are you selling to folks who aren’t going to buy your software or can’t help you refine your offering?  You’re talking to the wrong people, though many enjoy the entertainment of verbal jousting at your expense.
•       Law #6: Sell through a partner. If you can’t afford a sales force, leverage the client base on someone who already has a Fortune 500 client base.  That’s what BlitzLocal does with Webtrends, who opens doors for us that we would never get on our own.  In fact, we get to work with existing clients who have Webtrends as their analytics provider, which makes deals so much easier. It’s a win-win for everyone.

So that’s what it takes to go after the big boys.  If you’re not extremely lucky, you need the cash, connections, and focus to weather lengthy sales cycles. So think twice if you want to get Nike as a client.  They won’t even let you publicly mention them as a client if you do, so the referral value may be less than you anticipate.  But when you can find those particular clients who are partners that care about your success, too—then you’ve found a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

If you found this helpful, let me know in the comments below. If you want to argue, feel free to voice your opinion, too.  I can’t promise I’ll respond, but I will certainly try to respond to folks who ask for help. You can also reach me at facebook.com/dennisyu.

About the Author:

Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal, a Webtrends partner that builds social media dashboards to measure brand engagement and ROI, specializing in the intersection of Facebook and local advertising.   BlitzLocal is a leader in social and local advertising and analytics, creating mass micro-targeted campaigns. Mr. Yu has been featured in National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, CBS Evening News, and other venues. He is an internationally sought-after speaker and author on all things Facebook. BlitzLocal serves both national brands and local service businesses.

Original at Why Startups Fail to Win Big Deals BlitzLocal

Many Brands Within The Brand

Some large brands consist of many sub-brands. Let’s consider P&G as an example brand. They have many sub-brands, 23 of which have over a billion dollars in annual sales. Some of these sub-brands include Tide, Bounty, Pampers, Duracell, etc. Ideally, this type of megabrand should have a portfolio of sub-brands that tie back into a central hub page. The central hub is often weak, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but strengthening the hub will usually result in strengthening the brand overall.

When measuring the power of the megabrand, especially when comparing against their competitors, be sure to include their overall portolio (i.e. P&G vs. Unilever), as well as brand-to-brand comparisons of the sub-brands, such as Duracell vs. Energizer.

Targeting and Relevancy

When designing sample Facebook ads, remember that success with Facebook relies on being SUPER relevant to users. Let’s take a look at a few examples of how this can be applied.

Utilize Brand Connections

If the user is already familiar with the brand via a related connection, target those users specifically. For example, Tide has sponsored a car in Nascar for a long time. Fans of Darryl Waltrip and Ricky Rudd are then likely to also be fans of Tide, so targeting the fans of those Nascar champions is an easy win.

Leverage Existing Campaigns

We can leverage the power of a brand’s existing advertising. For example, if the brand is Yoplait yogurt, you know that they’ve spent a huge amount of money on the pink lids for breast cancer ad campaign. By targeting Susan Komen, breast cancer, and related interests– and then pairing that targeted base with a message that Yoplait supports breast cancer research, you can make their existing non-Facebook ad campaigns work double-time here. Send users to an appropriate web page that has a Like button on it (preferably on the Facebook page), to solidify that connection.

Harvest Celebrity Endorsements

Someone else has already done the footwork needed to attach a celebrity’s fan base to the brand, so harvest that base. For example, Carrie Underwood uses Olay, so target Carrie’s fans with relevant messages and landing pages for the Olay brand on Facebook. There is a LOT of celebrity traffic – a lot more than people who say they like laundry detergent or batteries or skin care products – so harvest that mass of low-hanging fruit.

Milk The Competitors

There’s nothing wrong with actually reaching out to the fans of the competition. For instance, if they like the Energizer Bunny, it’s possible they’ll also like Duracell. This can be hit or miss, as some fans are loyal to a fault and won’t have any desire to switch, but you won’t know without testing. Many fans are on the fence and can be pretty easily persuaded to flip.

Manage The Audit Process

The simplest tool to have on hand during the audit research phase is the spreadsheet. First, research a list of the interests that are related to each of the brands. Create a spreadsheet consisting of one row per interest, using four columns:

• Interest
• Audience Size (shown in Ad tool)
• Relevant Brand Fan Page URL
• Relationship Between the Interest and the Brand

The relationship column should include things like:

• Is the interest a competitor of the brand?
• Is the interest a non-profit that the brand supports?
• Is the interest a celebrity that endorses the brand?
• Is the interest a current advertising campaign that the brand is using?

When possible, ensure the spreadsheet includes at least a dozen interests. If the brand is a huge megabrand, you might end up with perhaps a hundred interest targets, all in the same spreadsheet.

With smart, highly relevant targeting, you can show the benefits of a Facebook campaign to any brand – big or small.

Original at Create Rock-Solid Facebook Audits Every Time BlitzLocal

Retargeting is a new buzzword that is quickly spreading through the marketing community. Many online business owners have heard the term recently but aren’t quite sure what it means. I spent some time researching this fast-growing marketing technique and wanted to share my findings with you.

Let’s start with a common definition of retargeting. Retargeting, also commonly known as “behavioral retargeting” or “behavioral remarketing”, essentially means targeting ads and marketing efforts at consumers and prospects who have previously visited your website, but did not convert.

The key here is that you target your ads only at users who have visited your site, have had some kind of experience with your brand, and who are now considered “lost” users. Retargeting aims to bring those lost users back to you, using ads that can skip the “introduction to your brand” phase.

Anyone who sells anything on the web understands that converting is the number one goal. Retargeting allows you to go after those lost conversions, and some studies show that retargeting can increase conversion rates by up to 125%.

Keys To Successful Retargeting Campaigns

1. Granular targeting: Being able to segment your visitors into small, tightly focused groups enables precise retargeting. For example, by knowing exactly which specific products and services your visitors engaged with on your site, you can later deliver those same product ad to that group of users.
2. Working with ad networks who have the technology to track and use the information obtained to present retargeted ads across a large network of sites is essential to making this work. When a user visits your site, a cookie is dropped to track that user’s interests on your site. You share that cookie with your ad network, who in turn, serves relevant ads to that same user as he or she lands on any other site that uses that ad network to serve ads.
3. Personalization of the ad is critical. You’ll set business rules to determine which ads get displayed (using dynamic content insertion) based on various factors, such as whether the user is a registered user of your site and has supplied you with an email address in the past, what phase of the buying cycle she is likely to be in, how many times she has visited and left without converting, etc.
4. Careful and continuous analysis of web analytics is a must to create successful retargeting campaigns. Knowing which ads work, and which ads the user has seen too many times are equally vital. A good campaign will provide a variety of ads aimed at promoting the same thing to measure success and frequency caps to avoid ad burnout.
5. Dynamic, customized landing pages work well. If a retargeted ad is successful in bring a user back to your site, acknowledging her return can welcome her and personalize the experience for her.
6. Once a retargeted user converts, the cookie is removed, and the user falls out of the retargeting group.
7. You can also use the same concept of retargeting in the social realm, though with admittedly less control, since you won’t be able to drop a cookie. You’ll also be limited to a narrow online world, but one which your users are likely spending most of their time. One of the big advantages of utilizing Facebook ads, for example, is that the ads can be targeted to highly specific groups. You can set up ads to target only Facebook users who have a relevant interest (or is a fan of a competitor), and who aren’t fans of you yet. Send them to a specific landing page. If they don’t convert (they don’t click the Like button), you can continue to show them a variety of different ads to remind them of your offer. You’ll also need to be careful to avoid ad burnout here, and may need to create shorter-term campaigns when retargeting within a social network. If your retargeting efforts succeed and a user converts, she’ll drop out of the user pool that you’re targeting with this group of ads.

Add Retargeting To The Marketing Mix

Marketers always want to supply the right ad to the right user at the right time. Sometimes, that means showing a generic display ad that introduces your brand to users who have never heard of you. Other times, you may show ads to search engine users with relevant PPC ads. Now, with retargeting, you can also show personalized ads to users who have already visited your site and failed to convert. Your brand is one they are already familiar with, so you can skip the introductions and move right to the phase of reminding them that they had considered one of your products in the recent past. Reminding “lost” users of your brand – and specific products – enables you to reach an audience that the other types of ads aren’t designed to reach.

Original at What’s Up With Retargeting? BlitzLocal

Speaker: Dan Thut, Rocketer, attempts to demonstrate how to use Facebook ads to grow the volume and efficiency of a PPC campaign, using a case study.

Chris McDonagh, webcast producer/moderator of searchmarketingnow.com introduced Marc Poirier, the CMO of Acquisio. Poirier talked a little about their software and introduced Dan Thut of Rocketer.

The question many ask is can we use Facebook for lead generation? The implied answer was yes, though it was left hanging.

Facebook advertising can have some pitfalls:

1. You can spend a lot of money very quickly, with not much to show for it
2. Many challenger brands are adopting Facebook advertising at a rapid and commendable rate, so they are eating away at big brands market share because they are getting to grips with this new advertising strategy faster than the big brands are.

You need an agile team and lots of tools to handle everything thrown at you from this new medium. (This was the beginning of a subtle sales pitch).

One overlooked way that Facebook advertising can be beneficial is that a well managed Facebook ad campaign can help established a PPC campaign deliver more value and more volume.

CASE STUDY:

• Increased monthly conversions from 8k to 21k
• CPA – cost per acquisition – dropped from 23 UK pounds to 13 pounds
• 34% increase in ppc brand searches
• 47% increase in direct-to-url traffic

Rocketer already had some data that suggested that people who clicked on a Facebook ad later transacted via a comparable Google PPC ad, but they wanted to test it. They carefully chose a client to work with and made sure they had total control of client’s marketing, to ensure the numbers would be accurate and not skewed by other factors.

They tested a lot of ads, and managed them closely.

They targeted UK men aged 16-45. (12 million)

How many different ad variants are needed for 12 million users?

They broke the group down into smaller groups. 113 counties x 25 sporting interests x 15 newspaper readerships – splits the 12 million users into tens of thousands of different niche interest groups!

Obviously, to manage tens of thousands of groups, each using at least a hundred different ad variants, you need technology to handle it all. (More subtle sales pitching here).

The process: build ads specific to each niche user group, get the right message to the right person at the right time, identify the successful ad types, but don’t stop there.

It only takes one rotten apple (ad) to quickly spoil the rest. Facebook ads can degrade very quickly (CTR drops / bounce rates rise), so their quality scores get worse. That one bad infects the others in the group quickly, and a lot of bad ads can infect the entire advertising account. Within 24 hours, a few bad apples can destroy all the ads in your account.

Since Facebook doesn’t tell us the quality score of ads, we have to gauge it ourselves, which is both important and difficult. So we need to watch the successful ads like a hawk and remove the degrading ones before they affect the others. Obviously, a tool is necessary to analyze thousands of ads and alert us when bad ones crop up. (I bet you know that this refers to the sales pitch, right?).

Although the presenter showed a graph indicating that PPC spend decreased while the Facebook ad testing was going on, I can’t say he ever really explained the correlation. I don’t know how or why one affected the other, so I’m not sure I would know how to duplicate such success.

In any case, this was really more about subtly selling software than it was about educating me on how Facebook ads can augment a PPC campaign. I don’t want to imply that they overdid the sales pitches, because it really was pretty subtle, but at the end, all I really got out of this presentation was that I need tools to manage large Facebook ad campaigns.

Original at The Impact of Facebook on PPC Advertising: A Case Study – Liveblogged BlitzLocal

“After performing a Google search for ‘local blue widgets’, I found your sponsored ad toward the bottom of the first page. Your ad looked more professional and appealing than the others even though it wasn’t at the top. I clicked on the ad and it brought me to a page that had great information on blue widgets. It was exactly what I was looking for, as if you somehow knew what I wanted…”

In the past when print media was the primary marketing channel, asking your prospects was a much more viable way to track your leads. You would get answers like “The billboard near my house”, “Your ad in the local newspaper”, “The Yellowpages”, or “The flier I got in the mail”. These things are easy for a viewer to remember. Online Marketing is different: when you browse through 20 different pages in ten minutes, it’s difficult to remember how you stumbled upon a website.

Unfortunately, with Online Marketing your typical answers like “The Internet”, or “A Google search”, simply aren’t enough information. You have no way of knowing if it was an organic result or a sponsored ad that they clicked on, and you can’t tell which page on your website they first landed on, or what keywords they searched. The fact of matter is that you can’t depend on prospects to tell you how they heard about you. We’ve seen folks say they searched Yahoo! for “Denver liposuction”, when we don’t even advertise on Yahoo! for that client. They’re not lying– they just don’t remember.

Here are 5 ways to track your online leads, the first being least effective and last being most effective:

1. Ask them how they heard about you: Even if the client had proper recall, the folks at the front desk aren’t always consistent. Do it anyway, but don’t rely on this data alone.
2. Use a “click to call” technology: For example, Google Voice allows you to embed a widget that will connect both parties. However, folks over 30 (the ones with money to spend on professional services), prefer seeing a phone number and dialing it. Plus, not seeing the phone number on the website will hurt your SEO– the search engines won’t see it as necessarily being local. If you’re in NYC, use a NYC area code; if in San Francisco, use a San Fransisco are code etc. This method is great for tracking leads, but you’re going to miss out on some sales or conversions. People want to see a phone number.
3. Use rotating extensions: So maybe you want to buy only one phone number. To track the source, you can have each page be a different extension– Press “1″ for “Denver Hair Removal“, press “2″ for “Denver Smart Lipo“, and so fourth. This does have its drawbacks; putting clients through another step is going to cause some portion of the leads to drop out.
4. Use multiple phone numbers:  Buying a web-only phone number guarantees that if they called that number, then they were on the site.  You can forward that web-only number to your regular number, so it’s no extra work for your office.  There are a bunch of vendors that provide call tracking, charging from $10 per line per month to $35 per line per month.  If you have 10 numbers, one to track each type of traffic, it becomes a large expense for a small business.  However, if you have just ONE phone number on the site, how are you going to track what keyword they came in on? Though it may be expensive, this is an extremely accurate and easy way to track your leads. You also wont have to worry about prospects dropping calls out of confusion or frustration like you do with multiple extensions.
5. Use a coupon code: For example, when visitors are on a Botox landing page, tell them to mention “BOTOXDOCTOR” to get $50 off their next procedure. Have a different code for each of your different landing pages. Good old fashioned coupon codes that provide an incentive for customers don’t cost you a thing, and is a simple way to effectively track your leads.

I find it surprising that more people don’t use coupon codes. Google Local Business Center and MerchantCircle as well as a few other directories have begun integrating coupons into their advertisements, making it easy for business owners to determine whether a new lead came from Google Maps, MerchantCircle, or some other source.

Original at 5 Ways to Track Leads From Online Marketing BlitzLocal