January 3rd, 2012
Didn’t get a chance to check out the Trada Webinar on making Facebook ads work for you? No worries! Here at BlitzLocal, we watched and learned, and took some notes for you. They started with an educational slideshow about the different types of Facebook ads, and finished by answering questions from the chat window. Here are our notes, and some additional article links for extra information.
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?
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?
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.
Tags: advertising, facebook ads, facebook ads platform, facebook advertising, Pay Per Click, PPC, Trada, webinar
Posted in Facebook, Learning Center | No Comments »
April 21st, 2011
This post was live-blogged from a webinar I attended today. It was presented by:
Susan Etlinger, Altimeter Group
Justin Huskamp, Product Marketing Manager, Coremetrics, an IBM company
The webinar begins with Justin discussing their Coremetrics Social analytics tool:
Social media marketing spend is the fastest growing investment, and will pass email marketing in 2013.
Facebook and Twitter command huge and growing audiences, and are a proven way for brands to reach their customers.
40% of Facebook users “like” companies
51% of twitter users follow companies, brands and products
Social likes and tweets are really just another form of a review.
Do social channels provide any incremental value?
- Social sites are second only to display for generating new visitors.
- Facebook engenders more session loyalty than email, twitter or referring sites.
- Facebook referrals are more efficient at conversions
Why build a social following?
People spend 90% of their Facebook time in their news feed. You NEED to be in the feed. Engagement makes the message viral. Once engaged, that customer is now an evangelist to an average of 137 like-minded friends. So, create a fun and engaging social content and contests. Don’t just throw offers at them.
Tracking Earned Media:
What’s Hot? Tools are needed to show where to focus on good content and good audiences. What’s converting? Once you track it, you need to appropriately attribute earned media alongside all channels. So, track the social channel, then compare it to other channels.
Susan is up now with her portion of the presentation:
Challenges of Social Data Measurement
- Multiple, shifting sources (which leads to)
- Inconsistent dataset
- New behaviors = new data types (what does it mean when someone likes…)
- Inconsistent quality
- No measurement standards (biggest issue)
- Privacy considerations
Social Measurement Sand Traps (3 Challenges)
Data Challenges
- Engagement – no agreement on what it means. Decide what it means for you and be transparent with your organization on that.
- Reach – Partial datasets, inconsistent measures
- Sentiment – Alogrithmic sentiment ~ 75% accurate at best
- Influence – Not all influence is created equal. Someone may have be an influencer to you for web tools, but not for cars or makeup.
Tool Challenges
Have to include new tools that specialize in social space, and old tools that specialize in enterprise crm, analytics, market research, so need tools that are a blend of both.
Organizational Challenges
Each corporate department looking at data in very different ways.
All this adds up to…
data challenges + tool challenges + organizational challenges =
Frankenmetrics
Before you do anything else, have a goal for measurement!
Use approriate metrics at each level:
- Social strategist: engagement metrics: fans, followers, clicks
- Line Of Business/Geo Stakeholders: social media analytics, insights, share of voice, word-of-mouth, resonance
- Corporate Level – Business metrics: revenue, reputation
The Elephant in the Room: ROI of social media (which may be the wrong question)
ROI = [Gain from investment - cost of investment] / Cost of investment
A better question might be: What is the BUSINESS VALUE of social media?
Case Study: Let’s imagine a Comcast customer tweets a complaint about not getting a particular TV channel in his area.
Think KPI, not [just] ROI when looking at this tweet.
How do each of the departments look at this tweet?
- Brand Marketing – Brand impact? Do we deal with it, ignore it, or what?
- Product Marketing – Isolated incident or trend? Should we offer it?
- Competitive Intel – Vulnerability or opportunity to outshine competition?
- Operations – How much did it cost to resolve?
- Customer Service – Did we make the customer happy?
Six Use Cases for Social Media Value
- Brand Health – Understand how people talk about your brand on social web.
- Marketing Optimization – Decision support for social marketing investment
- Revenue Generation – Generating leads, conversions, and revenue via social media
- Operational Productivity – Reducing operational costs via social media (saving money in call centers, for example)
- Customer Experience – Helping customers and improving their experience with your company and across channels
- Product Innovation – Consumer-led ideation
Social Insights and KPIs
1. Brand Health
Insights:
- What topics spark conversation?
- What topics spark emotion?
- Sentiment by social media channel
- Stated intent to purchase
- Whether brand gets credit for promotions
KPIs:
- Volume of social media mentions
- Sentiment
- Share of voice vs. competitors
- Number of fans/followers
- Highest-performing topics
- Number of brand mentions per campaign
2. Marketing Optimization
Insights:
- Which channels generate highest visit loyalty
- Which platforms generate highest logyalty/conversion/revenue
- Where conversations about your brand occur online
- Likeliness to buy based on specified behaviors
- If social channels cannibalize other online channels
- Most effective times to post social content/engage
- Where to find brand advocates
KPIs:
- Conversions/sales by channel
- Impressions by channel
- View-through/click-through by channel
- Visitor loyalty
- Advertising equivalent of earned social media
- Most followed account/people who talk about your brand
3. Revenue Generation
Insights:
- Effectiveness of social channels for conversion and revenue generation
- Likeliness to buy
- Impact of social media on search results
- Whether social channels are cannibalizing other channels
KPIs:
- Conversions by channel
- Sales by channel
- Visit loyalty
- Improved search engine placement
4. Operations Productivity
Insights:
- Potential cost savings from deflected calls
- Most active adovocates
- Which services issues best answered online
- Knowledge base gaps
KPIs:
- Number of calls deflected
- Call deflection savings
- Number of advocates
- Value of advocates
- Reduction/deferred hiring of FTE
5. Customer Experience
Insights:
- Most common service and product issues
- Triangulation of above with service channels
- Acceleration of issues
- Sentiment and emotion drivers
KPIs:
- Number of customer service issues addressed via social channels
- Percentage escalated and resolved
- Percentage of positive ratings and reviews
- Sentiment ratios
6. Innovation
Insights:
- Most common service and product issues
- Customer requests
- Competitive opportunities and threats
KPIs:
- Speed to market
- Product development efficiency
The Future of social Analytics:
- Enterprise-class capabilities such as data quality, integration, governance and scalability will be checkbox items
- A basic ability to understand social data will be come a critical skillset
- Machine learning will continue to improve, but probably not as fast as everyone wants it to.
- In the next 1-2 years, we’ll see social benchmarks
- Ultimately, the terms “social media”, “social business” and “social analytics” will go away.
Recommendations
Focus on which is incidental and which is vital.
- Have an objective
- Know your data
- Think globally, not locally (across the company departments)
- Think directionally (look at data patterns over time)
- Don’t underestimate the soft stuff (processes and people)
That concluded the webinar. I found some useful nuggets of information in this presentation.
Tags: measuring, Social media, webinar
Posted in SEO and Marketing | No Comments »
April 21st, 2011
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:
- You can spend a lot of money very quickly, with not much to show for it
- 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.
Tags: advertising, Facebook, google, PPC, webinar
Posted in Facebook | No Comments »
November 3rd, 2009
Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal will be giving his second webinar, presented by the American Marketing Association and ReadyTalk, on Facebook Advertising Techniques. His presentation, titled, 7 Effective Facebook Advertising Techniques for Brands and Direct Marketers, will focus on how Social PPC advertising is different than traditional PPC and will answer questions such as:
• What ads are most effective?
• What is the optimal bid strategy?
• How do you best target against keywords and demographic targets?
• How do you measure performance?
• What are the primary mistakes newcomers make on the Facebook platform?
The free webinar will be held Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 2pm EST. Register for the Facebook Advertising Techniques webinar today!
This webinar is targeted at an intermediate audience with some basic familiarity of PPC concepts. An essential presentation if you’d like to increase your current knowledge of online advertising related subject matter & the most efficient practices that will bring your brand to the forefront of qualified prospects.
Tags: events, facebook advertising, press release, webinar
Posted in Company Blog | 2 Comments »
September 3rd, 2009
On October 14, 2009 at 12:00pm CDT Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal.com, will give a webinar presented by the American Marketing Association and ReadyTalk on Facebook Marketing Tactics: How to Monetize Your Brand Through Facebook.
The webinar will focus on answering the following questions:
- How do you port your traditional search campaigns and make them social?
- How do you take advantage of the viral loop?
- How does user targeting differ from keyword targeting?
- What are best practices in creative management that will increase your CTR and avoid wasting lots of money?
- How do you track performance and conversions in tandem with traditional search?
- How can you multiply performance by tying in Facebook pages for your brand and build up a fan base?
Dennis Yu is CEO of BlitzLocal.com, a 50 person agency based in Westminster, Colorado, specializing in local lead gen, integrating Facebook advertising with social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising, directory listings, web analytics, and call tracking. Clients include Quiznos, Equifax, AmazingMail and other national retail and franchised outlets. A 14 year veteran of online marketing with Yahoo! and American Airlines, Dennis is an acknowledged thought leader in search, affiliate, and internet marketing. He has spoken at conferences around the world, including Singapore, Australia, and the US.
To sign up for the free Webinar visit: https://cc.readytalk.com/r/6sg7k5akaeos
Tags: events, facebook advertising, press release, webinar
Posted in Company Blog | 1 Comment »
