SearchInfluence

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

What will Facebook report on in the Ad Interface?

Ever wake up to a whole new world?

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.

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 exp ...

Go see this movie! ...we know you want to...

I came across a kind of shocking figure the other day while reading about the Facebook IPO. It appears Facebook ad sales generated $3 billion in revenue in 2011. That’s as much money as JP Morgan appears to have lost recently. Whoops.

But here’s an even more brain-wrinkling number: traditional television ads generated $68 billion in revenue last year. You know what you could buy with that extra $65 billion? Bill Gates.

That's some brand love.

A few weeks ago, Facebook Marketing Solutions, the advertising side of the social media giant, released its new education portal for small businesses just starting out online, titled Facebook for Business.

Facebook Ads. Are You Doing it Right?

Recently a slew of articles have been popping up about the ineffectiveness of Facebook advertising. While we recently touched on this subject in a previous blog post, I thought I would explain why this statement has little credence when Facebook ads are done properly. If you’ve read any of our previous FB blog posts, you are aware that for Search Influence, Facebook yields a low cost per lead making it one of our most effective ways to drive leads to clients’ sites. With that being stated, I can proceed to e ...

Choosing the Right Images for Your Facebook Ads

Image from www.adrants.com

In a previous Facebook Advertising blog post I mentioned the importance of selecting images for your Facebook ads. What I failed to do in that post was to fully explain that idea. Sure I threw out some fancy jargon about “magazine editorial ads”, but I wanted to take this time to show you three types:

1) Contextually Relevant

Facebook Ad 1

I am frequently asked what the next big thing in paid marketing is – while I tend to keep my online marketing secrets close to my chest, I always answer Facebook. With hundreds of millions active users, it is Sutter’s Mill in the pay-per-click Gold Rush. As paid search platforms are experiencing exponential growth and decay, it offers advertisers an opportunity to target potential leads at a significantly lower cost than traditional PPC.

As the world’s largest social media site, Facebook has become the popular choice for the local and niche businesses. By allowing marketers to directly interact with people through paid ads, interest groups and applications, it adds a level of engagement lacking in traditional online marketing.

Data.

This is the most fundamental building block when trying to determine the success of a Pay-Per-Click campaign.

Data tells you if that “iffy” ad copy you wrote is actually paying off and it also tells you when something’s gone belly up and is stinking up your cost per lead. But despite being extremely useful, data is also extremely problematic especially when you are using third party report tool with unrelated PPC platform.  The data gets well… unpleasant. This statement has been especially true for me using tools such as Analytics to track Facebook advertising performance.

Hi, my name is Anthony and I am a recovering search marketing luddite.

Facebook Yields High ROI on PPC Ads

For years there have been only three internet ad services I viewed successful: Google Adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Search, and MSN Adcenter.  Don’t misunderstand; I was aware of other services.  I am a social media packrat after all, but I never considered them realistic alternatives to the holy SEM trinity. They seemed like gimmicks. As PPC manager at Search Influence, I provide these services to our clients but I never realized how truly profitable social media advertising was until I started comparing the conversion rates. The numbers spoke loud and clear – Facebook (to my surprise) was ge ...