Types of Facebook Ads

As Facebook has become a more robust advertising platform, a broad smattering of ad units have shown up all over the platform. Almost every kind of content can be advertised on Facebook, from a text status to a Facebook app to a web site, leading to increased interaction and ultimately stronger organic performance of the content. It’s important to keep in mind the same things that drives high organic action rates: the importance of EdgeRank, the necessity of AWESOME, and the value of truly social campaigns.

Marketplace Ads

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Get Real ROI on Facebook with Sponsored Stories

Many, including big brands, are convinced that Facebook Ads are a waste of money. Under their assumptions, even high rates of fan interaction don’t correlate to new business. However, it’s clear that promoting strong organic posts beyond the natural reach of a page drives the expected post interaction and page likes, while delivering real, money-making conversions.

By focusing on the psychographics, i.e. interest groups, who might be interested in each individual post, a marketer not only saves time and energy by merging organic and paid advertising campaigns, but also leverages the better position and higher click-through rate of Sponsored Stories to expand the business’s reach among its target groups.

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AdWords Enhanced Campaigns: Naughty or Nice for SMBs & Agencies?

Yesterday, Google announced what might be the largest restructuring of the AdWords platform to date: Enhanced Campaigns. Building on (and some say attempting to boost) the influx of mobile advertisements on AdWords, Enhanced Campaigns are an attempt to simplify the mobile pay-per-click management process by removing barriers to ROI calculation for SMB advertisers. While many advertisers are less than enthused about the changes, Search Influence welcomes the new features, streamlined campaign creation process, and simpler campaign management and assessment that Enhanced Campaigns brings to the table.

Nice!

The official blog post on Inside AdWords is clear about the goals of Enhanced Campaigns: simplify mobile and multi-touch marketing for the part-time advertiser. Citing a study on the new world of multi-screen browsing, Google claims 90% of consumers “move sequentially” between several devices during the conversion funnel.

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Advanced Facebook Ads: How to Beat Disapproval

While some may view the right-hand side of their Facebook stalking experience as an uninteresting blob of text, Facebook was once the world’s largest display advertising network, pulling in over $2.2 billion in annual revenues. Even now, Facebook ads are an invaluable tool for any social media campaign. Industry standard click-through rates, the percentage of the time an impression leads to a user clicking on an ad, hover around .05%, but we’ve recently seen CTRs as high as 1.5% for well-targeted sponsored stories and over 7% for post like ads!
 
 

But this glowing opportunity can be hard to grasp if you work in less family-friendly fields. The reader can easily imagine business models that may be be considered prima facie inconsistent “with the overall user experience” of Facebook. For those businesses, it’s important to understand the value of “black hat” advanced Facebook PPC: bending editorial guidelines to best advertise your product.

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5 For Friday - Links, Stories, & Posts For Your Weekend

We’re back with another 5 for Friday, a collection of the freshest and tastiest SEO news stories, blogs and recommendations from across the web!

Is Google Scared of Amazon? — SEOBook

SEOBook, latching on to a Bing-sponsored study that indicted Google’s switch from Shopping Search to AdWords-based Product Listing Ads, posits that Google is afraid of Amazon’s conversion data. SEOBook claims that, like the search behemoth’s failed acquisition and then direct competition of Groupon, Google exerts its organic search power to give credence to its product search, which due to brand recognition and skillful acquisitions has become a strong pull away from Amazon’s purely organic search strategy.

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Did Social Fall Flat on Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

The weekend after Thanksgiving was one of the most aggressive marketing blitzes in recent memory. News reports had three shopping holidays to choose from: the venerable Black Friday, which started around 1961 but didn’t gain the influence it now has until as late as 2005; Small Business Saturday, a American Express-backed venture that took advantage of a Twitter hashtag in 2010 supporting local brick-and-mortars; and Cyber Monday, coined by the National Retail Federation in 2005. These three days have only been increasing in search volume and clout, and are now at the forefront of the holiday business season.

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Facebook Promoted Posts: Taking Away Your Fans?

Last week, a small ripple went through the Dangerous Minds blog, crying out “I WANT MY FRIENDS BACK!” Letting out a screed of massive proportions, the piece has made its rounds on the very social network it lambasts, even having some of the 59,502 fans replace their profile pictures with the header image. But like most widely-circulated rants, the post is largely sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Facebook celebrity George Takei had been complaining about this “problem” enough to hit the Wall Street Journal this past June. And while earlier this month Facebook extended their Promoted Posts to individual users, Pages have had the option since late May, and the feature’s older cousin Sponsored Stories have been around since January of 2011. Even more striking is that as early as December 2010, only a small subset of your fans would see your posts, and Facebook was then using an impression count, which seems inflated compared to the Reach metric we see today.

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How To Set Up Wordpress Social Metadata

We couldn’t be prouder to announce that our own Doug Thomas’s video has won the SEOMoz Youtube Contest! Social metadata, the hidden content that displays your content in a correct and attractive way on social media sites, is one of the most overlooked aspects of posting a blog or article, and this tutorial provides a concise and thorough explanation of how to utilize it. Metadata lets Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ know what title, description, and image to show in the preview on the site. To implement Facebook OpenGraph, Twitter Cards and Google+ Authorship, you now just need one <link> tag rather than the more complicated three-link monte from earlier. In this tutorial, we use built-in WordPress functions to edit the theme of your site to create a semi-automated, scalable way to correctly generate this metadata.

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5 For Friday - Links, Stories, & Posts For Your Weekend

We’re back with another 5 for Friday, a collection of the freshest and tastiest SEO news stories, blogs and recommendations from across the web!

Brace Yourself: The Next Penguin Update Will Be Big — SEO Round Table

Matt Cutts didn’t just hint at the Search Engine Strategies San Francisco conference, he outright warned “You don’t want the next Penguin update.” More importantly, he gave insight into how the black-and-white creatures update. Panda is now a regular and quiet update, more like a ranking factor than an “update,” while Penguin still has some iterations before it will settle into the same kind of rolling boil. All this means for your online marketing is to be aware of the ever-changing search engine rank and to weather storms with sharable and linkable content.

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5 for Friday — Links, Stories, & Posts for Your Weekend

We’re back with another 5 for Friday, a collection of the freshest and tastiest SEO news stories, blogs and recommendations from across the web!

Most importantly, this happened. Now for the rest:

Beluga Analytics Offers Demographics & Stats Behind Your Guiltiest Pleasures — AimClearBlog.com

We’ll start today with something really fun: Grooveshark released Beluga Analytics today, which is a wealth of demographic data using music as a touchstone for marketing data. Did you want to know what game systems Faith No More fans likely have? Maybe not, but beyond simple interest, this data gives a really interesting and sneaky way to target people for advertising. If you see that a certain band’s fans are disproportionally predisposed to own a certain product, targeting them with your Facebook ads might give you business you never thought existed.

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