transcript - facebook marketing success summit ads presentation 2011

Copyright 2011, Social Media Examiner

TRANSCRIPT

F a c e b o o k

S u c c e s s S u m m i t 2 0 1 1

S u c c e e d i n g w i t h F a c e b o o k A d v e r t i s i n g

I N S T R U C T O R : C H R I S T R E A D A W A Y

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Session Transcript SocialMediaExaminer.com of 33 Copyright 2011, Social Media Examiner

Transcript Introduction This session is titled "Succeeding with Facebook Advertising," with Chris Treadaway. Chris is co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day. He founded Notice Technologies, an advertising company for media companies, and is managing director for Ultrastart, a social media consulting company. In today's session, Chris will show you how to succeed with Facebook advertising campaigns. Presentation Thank you very much for having me and thank you all for being here today. Poll Question: How Much Experience Do You Have with Facebook Ads? I thought we'd start out with a quick poll: how much experience do you have with Facebook Ads?

• A lot • A little • None

This is just so I can have an idea of all the people out there and what you know about Facebook Ads so we can spend time on the things we need to spend time on. We have a lot of ground to cover today, so why don't we take a look at that poll right now? There we go. "A little" and "None" take the day.


Agenda Thanks again everybody for being here. Just a quick agenda, we'll go through: • Introduction

• The business case for Facebook Ads

• Facebook Ads basics

• Some of the weaknesses of Facebook Ads

• Some specifics on how to drive success and run campaigns

• Things that we've learned in our business

• Q&A About First, a little bit of context. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Notice Technologies. Previously, I was at Microsoft for three and a half years, where my last job there was being responsible for web strategy for the company, which was a very, very interesting role in the early, early days of Facebook. Just to give you all an idea, Facebook had about 25 million users as opposed to 800 million+ now. They had 25 million users when I took that role at Microsoft. This is my third start-up, and I got an MBA from the University of Texas in 2004. Company We run a company that does a few different things. Probably the most interesting for this conversation is our managed Facebook Advertising business called Social Media Buy, where we run campaigns for small and medium businesses and for bigger companies as well.


A lot of what we're going to share with you today is based on our experiences of running hundreds and hundreds of campaigns for different companies of all different types. Almost all of those campaigns have been run on Facebook, so you're going to get the shortcut into the collective wisdom that we've gathered over the years in running these campaigns going back to 2009. Co-Author I co-authored Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day with this lovely lady, Mari Smith, in 2010. We're actually working on the second edition of the book now that should be released sometime in the spring of next year. So we're pretty excited about that. Contributor/Technical Editor In addition, I've been a technical editor and occasional contributor to two books: • Facebook Marketing: Leverage Social Media to Grow Your Business –

that was actually the first Facebook marketing book that was released in the marketplace in, I think, 2008.

• Killer Facebook Ads by Marty Weintraub, which was released just a few

months ago. I can tell you, guys, it's really a spectacular, spectacular book. I have nothing but great things to say about it. Marty really captured a lot of the ins and outs in a lot more detail than what I'll go through today.

So if there's one recommendation to take away from all this, it's that Marty's book is really, I think, a wonderful, wonderful work and a great companion, and something that people that want to dive into Facebook advertising themselves really should take advantage of and purchase because it's really fantastic book that covers all the ins and outs of running campaigns.


What We Know About Facebook... First, let's cover what we know about Facebook at a high level here. Facebook Owns the Social Audience First of all, we'll set the stage here for what we know about Facebook relative to other properties. According to Citigroup, Facebook owns what's approaching about 20% market share in terms of web activity in the world. It's an unbelievable number. As you can in the chart, in particular dating back from 2007 when it had little less than 2% share going all the way up to the present day, Facebook is really continuing to grow and thrive and do really, really well. So despite what skeptics and cynics may say, Facebook really does own the social audience. Facebook Ad Growth Is Unreal Ad growth is really unbelievable. The data points here on the left side of the screen were some of the numbers that I shared with those of you who were on the call last year. The estimates, according to AllFacebook, were that Facebook did about $600 million in ads, and that for 2010, they were supposed to have done $1.28 billion in revenue. But what actually happened – and I thought this was really pretty interesting from eMarketer – you'll see that in 2009, they actually did $740 million instead of $600 million. And in 2010, they did $1.86 billion, not $1.28 billion. So they've done fantastically well with advertising as the core business model of Facebook. Roughly 88% to 91% of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising.


It's pretty phenomenal. As you can see, the growth projections for 2012 and 2013 make Facebook just a massive, massive player in the ad business, which is something that people didn't necessarily foresee maybe even as little as three years ago. Facebook Dominates Social Media In terms of the amount of time spent on social media, this from Nielsen, "State of the Media: Social Media Report 2011," Facebook owns a dominant majority of time spent across the major Internet properties: Facebook, Google, YouTube, Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter. I thought it was interesting they didn't include the Microsoft properties in this chart because they might have a little bit of a presence in this chart. But the point to make here is that Facebook is unbelievably strong in terms of the amount of time people are spending. One thing we know from every type of media that exists out there is that where people spend their time, ad dollars follow. Fortunately, I think, for those of us that are still working in advertising and working in social media, there is still plenty of opportunities for us to take advantage of advertising on Facebook. The Business Case for Facebook Ads Let's run through a few pretty quick reasons why I think Facebook Advertising makes a lot of sense: • First of all, it's accessible to anyone that has $1 a day or more in terms

of budget. It doesn't take very much money if you're going to run your own Facebook ads to actually try it out.

It does take money to optimize and do well with Facebook Ads, but you can actually get your foot in the door for not very much money.

• It's the richest demographic targeting opportunity that currently exists in the world for advertising when you consider that Facebook has 800 million+ profiles that it can read from. It can pull the demographic


data out of the profiles that people have made available on Facebook and make that available to advertisers as groups of people that you can advertise to.

• The combinations and permutations of targeting are really

unbelievable and still relatively inexpensive.

If you target an audience of about 100,000 people or more and you're doing the self-serve advertising yourself, you can get the clicks for about $1.50 to $2 apiece, which ends up being a lot cheaper in most cases than Google click-throughs.

And you can get the impressions for a CPM at about 25 to $0.30 apiece or less. So you can do really well. It does get more expensive as you do more aggressive targeting, but this is roughly what you can expect to spend if you end up running the campaigns yourself. I think that compares pretty well to other options that an advertiser may have.

Social Advertising Alternatives

If you think about Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter as other social media advertising alternatives, they have some limitations that Facebook does not have. Google, for example, has been around for a really long time, and so a lot of the click-throughs are very, very expensive. It's not uncommon to hear of clicks costing $5, $7, $10 apiece. LinkedIn has done a much better job, I think, over the last year improving their ads offering. But even so, compared to what you spend on Facebook, it's actually pretty expensive. Then if you look at Twitter, Twitter's advertising is more or less sponsored tweets at the moment. There are few advertising options. But Twitter as a platform is much simpler and doesn't capture all the demographic data that Facebook does, and so Twitter cannot in turn


make that available to advertisers as easily as Facebook can and does already. Old Media Alternatives Then think about for a moment old media alternatives. Let's say you're not going to go the social media route – you're going to go the old media route: billboards, radio, television, yellow pages, etc. In almost all these cases, they're more expensive than what you can get from Facebook just from a CPM perspective. In a lot of these cases, you can't track what actually happens, or you're relying on third parties to tell you how effective the advertising was or what demographic groups you may have reached. There are just a lot of ways that I think Facebook is truly a disruptive sort of technology where an advertiser gets a lot more value and a lot better value for less money. So I think that it makes a lot of sense for a lot of advertisers in a lot of areas. And I think some companies are beginning to figure that out now. How Facebook Ads Work... Let's go through quickly how Facebook Ads work for those of you that are relatively new. I think about 19% have no experience with Facebook Ads, so let's just go through the basics pretty quickly here. What Is a Facebook Ad? A Facebook ad is typically what shows up on the right-hand side of the screen as you log in to Facebook and as you experience it in different places inside Facebook. It's that area there inside the red box. Basic Facebook Ad Specs In terms of the ad specifications, because Facebook is trying to make everything sort of fit into this space here, Facebook is actually pretty restrictive about what you can put into the title, the size of the image, the


body, what you can say inside the body. And all of it is contained inside a 120 X 240 pixels box that's on the right-hand side of the screen. In that tight real estate that's sitting alongside the news feed on the left or whatever it is that you're looking at inside Facebook, that's the opportunity that you have as a advertiser to get someone's attention. There's limited space and you have to economize and do a really good job of using what's given to you. But in so doing, you can make a lot of things happen that way. Where Ads Appear These ads appear inside: • Profile pages you may be scanning

• Facebook pages (business)

• Games and applications pages (you may be playing a game down the left-hand side and the ads show up to the right of that)

• News feed page that I showed you two slides ago. But that's a sponsored position managed by Facebook. It's a higher CPM and it's not available through self-serve advertising at the moment.

You may notice one other thing too. Inside the games, those ads will actually refresh after a certain period of time. You might be playing a game and you might notice an ad down the right-hand side. If you don't click it, if you wait for a minute or two, those ads on the right-hand side may actually refresh. So one thing as a marketer we have to think about is if somebody is experiencing these ads inside of game, they may actually go away. They don't just sit on the screen for as long as somebody is playing Mafia Wars or Mafia Wars 2 or any of the social games that have gotten popular over the years. What You Can Promote


With Facebook Ads, you can promote: • Websites • Facebook Pages • Facebook Places • Facebook Events • Facebook Apps & Tabs You can promote a lot of different types of things, and it's really sort of up to the marketer's imagination in terms of what you want to actually get people to do. When they read an ad, do you want them to go to a website? Do you want them to like a Facebook page or attend an event that is being promoted on Facebook, and so on and so forth? You can promote a lot of different things. A majority of them are things that you can do inside Facebook, but you can also promote really anything with a distinct URL on the Internet. Types of Facebook Ads There are two primary high-level types of Facebook Ads. There's self-serve, so that's what you access when you click "Ads" on the left-hand side of the screen when you first log in to Facebook. For that little as $1 a day budget, you can get impression-based advertising or CPM advertising, or you can get clicks. Those are the two options that you have right now. These things are highly, highly configurable. The sponsored advertising, the bigger budgets, the large ad buys, these are things, as I mentioned before, that show up on the news feed, and the minimum budget is about $5,000 a month, with a $5 to $7 CPM. So you end up spending a lot more money on sponsored ads than you spend on self-serve ads. But I think what Facebook has recognized is that that ad inventory – that space available in the upper right-hand side of the screen on the news


feed, which is what users see when they first log in – is really premium space. People might log in to their news feed and then not even come back to Facebook for the rest of the day or not use any of the other features inside Facebook, so Facebook has really put a premium on that real estate on the news feed. It is administered by Facebook Ad sales directly, so you actually have to talk to an Ad sales rep and deal with them to get that. One of the plus sides of this is that if you go this route and you have that kind of ad budget, you can get them to give you the reports and work with you on creating your campaign. But at a $5 to $7 CPM compared to a $0.25 to $0.30 CPM if you did it yourself, or a little more if you used a maintenance service, it's a big, big difference in terms of how much inventory you get, how many ad impressions you get for your money. The sponsored ads tend to be used a lot more by brands and bigger companies, whereas the self-serve ads tend to be used a little more by smaller companies. Types of Self-Serve Ads There are two types of self-serve ads. Inside that, there are several types of ads that you can choose from, and there is some nuance, I think, in the different types of opportunities that are available. • Facebook Ads For Facebook Ads – and this is all serviced inside the self-serve interface – you can run what's called a Facebook Ad, which is just a typical type of demographic targeting of people who like a page or whom you want to reach with a particular offer. Let's say you want to hit a particular demographic group and send them to a website or send them to a landing page. You would do that using a Facebook Ad.


You may, though, instead want to run some ads that people will see like a Page Post Ad or a Facebook Ads for Pages that will end up promoting a page as opposed to a URL. So these are ways that you get people to pay attention to Facebook pages, and these are ways to attract more fans to a Facebook page. • Sponsored Stories The Sponsored Stories are a little bit different. This is something that Facebook actually made available, I guess, about a year or maybe nine months ago where people can get help distributing content from a page, place, or application. For those of you that are familiar with EdgeRank or have seen some other presentations at this summit about EdgeRank, EdgeRank filters out a lot of content that people might actually be interested in seeing. What Facebook has done is sort of taken that dynamic of EdgeRank filtering out certain pieces of content and has given marketers an opportunity to actually make that content more visible and kind of circumvent problems they may have with EdgeRank where content isn't necessarily showing up regularly. So these are the kinds of ads that you would run where in that sponsored section in the upper right-hand side of the screen, as opposed to seeing a sponsored ad, you might see a sponsored story – the friends of someone that liked a page, they might see that their friend liked a particular page. That's a tactic that we use pretty regularly to get the fan count increased for properties that we work with that are interested in increasing their fan count. The Check-in Story will allow people to promote when Facebook users check in to a place. And then the Page Post Like Stories are going to be ads that demonstrate that people liked a page post that was made by a brand on Facebook.


There's some nuance in all that. It can be a little bit confusing, but you actually have different types of ads to handle different types of situations that you may run into as a marketer on Facebook. How to Buy In terms of buying these ads, you can set a lifetime budget or a monthly budget, so it's very configurable in that respect. You can run for an ongoing period of time, or you can set a stop date for your campaign. That's particularly handy if you want to run something for, say, two weeks and then look at the outcomes and see what happened. You can also create your own ad copy and upload your own ad imagery. The key to running good Facebook ads is making sure that you have an attractive or interesting title, interesting ads, and interesting imagery that can draw someone's eye over to the right side of the screen because that's something you'll definitely want to do. The approval process can take a little time, and sometimes if it's over a weekend, perhaps it might take a little longer than a few hours to get approval for your ad. Sometimes you'll actually get your ad disapproved because you violated the ad guidelines that Facebook provides that are designed to make the ads appealing, interesting, and not fraudulent. You go through a purchase process as you're creating your targeting criteria, and that helps you set up your advertising campaign. Targeting Options There are a wide variety of targeting options that are useful to you and that are available to you inside Facebook: • Geography • Demographics (age, gender) • Education level • Interests


• Workplaces • Sexual orientation • Relationship status • Languages • College attended • Birthday All of this, or a vast, vast majority of this outside of geography, comes from user-submitted data. You're relying on the users to generate reliable profile data, which has not so far been a problem for Facebook. The geography, though, sometimes will use a combination of what the user says and IP addresses to determine where the user actually is. It's been creepy for me, for instance, when I've traveled, been in another city, and gotten an ad served to me on Facebook for that city. It's like, "How did they figure that out?" Facebook is using IP addresses in some cases to help figure out where users are. Things You CAN'T Target Now, for all the things you can do on Facebook for targeting: • You can't target people who attended "some college" at some time or

have "some education." When we've run some ad campaigns for people in secondary schools and community colleges and so on and so forth, they've wanted to do that. You can target people that are in college or in high school, or college graduates, but not necessarily people that have "some college" experience.

• You cannot target people based on race or ethnicity. That's just

something that you have to find other ways to reach people in those target markets.

• You cannot target specific high schools. • We recommend the vast majority of people that come to us wanting

zip code targeting to hold off just because Facebook did introduce it a


little while ago, but it's not really functional in a lot of zip codes. We know of a lot of zip codes that have 40,000-50,000 people in them, but according to Facebook, they might only have 300 if you're trying to target that zip code.

The zip code targeting is getting better, but it's not necessarily reliable for all zip codes yet, so we just tell people to proceed cautiously with zip codes.

• Then you can't target people that just don't enter certain types of profile information into Facebook. There are hidden demographics of people that just fill out one or two of the necessary lines of demographic information about themselves and maybe don't fill out age or don't fill out birthday, for instance.

I think a lot of people rush to want to do the demographic targeting, but they don't realize that they're leaving out a vast majority of people that are not necessarily filling out every piece of profile information that they could fill out. The targeting is useful for people that do opt in and do tell you what they're interested in, what their birth date is, and so on and so forth, but it's not exhaustive, and it doesn't apply to all Facebook users. So if you rely strictly just on targeting, you might be missing a vast majority of people in your target market.

What You Can Do with Facebook Ads... Shifting gears for a moment, in terms of business outcomes where we've seen the most success for people is in a few areas. Drive Successful Business Outcomes For instance, there's direct incremental revenue. In some cases, you can do a really good job to drive customers and drive leads to businesses by spending a certain amount of money on advertising and having them get more in return.


It doesn't always work, but in some cases it does. You just have to kind of try that out, but that's a potential business outcome that can work with Facebook Ads. Building customer lists and finding leads, we've done a really good job with those types of things. Where people are looking for email addresses or people are looking for customers for a particular product, it's a really good way to do that and reach your target market effectively. It's good for testing hypotheses. This is something I don't have in the slides, but a lot of people that I know with a new business idea or new product concept will actually run targeted Facebook ads at particular demographic groups to do research just to find out if there is a big market for their product or service. Then, of course, you can kick off a viral marketing campaign by pointing people in the direction of a video or pointing people in the direction of an interesting or funny piece of content. Those are some of the things where we think it works pretty well. Lower Your Costs There's another element to all this as well in terms of lowering costs for a business. Customer acquisition cost can be really high for certain types of businesses, but when you can run Facebook ads at a $0.40 CMP or a $0.45 CPM, it can be a lot more effective than, say, that 4X4 advertisement in a newspaper. In terms of cost per touch or cost per engagement, we can reduce costs for that. We've seen that happen. Also, in the customer service arena, a lot of businesses we're seeing, especially bigger companies, are moving to online and social media support models. You have airlines listening, and you have people like Dell that are listening to every piece of social media feedback that they may


get. You can address problems with messaging or customer service issues proactively by just listening to what's happening and responding directly to customers as things progress. There are ways to make more money and save more money by using Facebook Ads and Facebook ad campaigns to reach your customers more effectively. How? Iterate. How do you go about doing this? Well, one piece of advice I would give to people that are looking to succeed with Facebook Ads is to set up an iterative process to help learn what happens by putting marketing messages and so on in front of customers. There's a process that we adhere to really in every Facebook advertising campaign that we run for ourselves or for other people where we: • Create ad copy

• Run ads for a week or maybe 14 days

• Look at what's happened and assess what's happened

• Retire underperforming ads, imagery, messaging, and things that just don't seem to be working

• Keep the ones that have gone well and put together new iterations based on the things that we've learned

This cycle is very repetitive and can be a little boring for people that don't love process. But the numbers – it's really about iterating on the outcomes of what's happening and then using the numbers to inform you as to what you should do next. Basics of Iteration – The A/B Test One of the basics of iteration is called the A/B test.


This is just a really simple example here. You're trying to test differences in ad performance based on a single variable, keeping everything else alike. In this particular case, you see these two arrows pointing to a hamburger and pointing to a logo for sunshine. We've kept everything else the same. "Eat at Joe's!" is the same. We actually have ad copy underneath that's the same. All we're trying to do is say, "What works better – a picture of an ad with a hamburger or a picture of an ad with sunshine?" That's our A/B test: hamburger versus sunshine. Then we'll do these things at a higher level. We'll run women in one group and men in another group. For instance, in this particular example, there will be four different ads that we'll run: • Women with the hamburger • Women with the sunshine • Men with the hamburger • Men with the sunshine We'll just watch those ads run for two weeks, see what happens, and then check the outcomes. A/B Test Tale of the Tape In this particular case, we tried to run the same CPM bid, we tried to run the same amount of budget, and we tried to run the same impression count. We're trying to keep as many things as similar as possible. But an A/B test is really about changing one variable and having two examples of that that we can actually test to see what happens. In this particular case, we actually got far more clicks on the sunshine from women and far more clicks on the hamburger from men, and our effective cost per click for this campaign was actually really good in those two instances.


So we would retire the women/hamburger ad, and we would probably retire the men/sunshine ad and continue a better data optimized for the best click results that we can get. That's really what we're after with all of this – to just run numbers, keep things the same, and make sure that we can tell based on the numbers what's succeeding and what's not succeeding. Iteration Makes You Smarter The process of doing these kinds of things repeatedly for your campaigns will help make you a lot smarter. That was a pretty simplistic example. For a lot of campaigns, we may be running 10 A/B tests simultaneously. For bigger customers, we may be running 20-30 permutations of ad copy, imagery, and title text just to see what combinations do best for advertisers that we work with. It's a best practice that we highly recommend for everyone who has the time to do it. Time Trending Analysis The other thing that is important to all of this in succeeding with Facebook Ads is the time trending analysis. How can we tell over time how a series of ads or a campaign may do? We do this because we know for a fact that ads and ad campaigns fatigue over time. Let's say you have a target market of 200,000 people. If you run five impressions at them, a vast majority of those people may not have noticed your advertisement. If you run 50 impressions at them, you can probably conclude that a lot of people have seen the ad and have either chosen to click it or have been uninterested in it. As you have a higher number of impressions per person, you start to see apathy either because people ignore the ad, or maybe people have already acted upon the ad and they've already become a customer, so


running new ads at them is not actually going to matter – it's not going to give you a new customer. We always track how things are performing over time just to make sure we can tell how things are performing, how things are fatiguing, and if we need to make some changes to ad copy, imagery, or targeting criteria to reach new customers. A Real-life Example I'll give you guys a real-life example. This is something we've done quite a bit. We actually run ads to see how the click-through rates start to change over time. We did some ad tweaks, we got the ads improved to these levels here, and then we started seeing the numbers fall off here at Week 7. It peaks here at Week 6 in terms of the click-through rate, the click-through rate being the percentage of time people will click something based on the number of impressions that they see. We look pretty aggressively for click-through rate changes and cost-per-fan changes where we see a peak here in Week 6, and then we can begin to project as the numbers get a little worse that the ads are starting to underperform. We're really obsessive over watching things sometimes by day, sometimes by week, sometimes by month – it really depends on what the advertiser is interested in. We're watching very, very closely to see how the ads perform, how the ads succeed in sales, and over time how they fatigue, and determine when we need to make some changes. Time trending data, taking the time to actually record what's happening week by week, will give us a really good sense as to what's happening – should we retire things, should we continue, or should we move on? Facebook Advertising Gotchas...


We have about 10 minutes left, so we'll get into some "gotchas" and we'll get into some things that we've learned from Facebook Ad campaigns, and then I'll take questions here for about 15 minutes or so. In terms of the gotchas, I've talked about all the different things that I think make sense about Facebook Advertising. But there are some weaknesses to it as well, and I think these are important things to consider as you get into a Facebook Ad campaign. 1. First of all, a vast majority of the Facebook targeting criteria are

determined by user-submitted data. If the user doesn't submit data, Facebook doesn't know to target that user. You may still have a Boston Red Sox fan, but if they don't say so in their Facebook profile, then you're reliant on other things that they've entered in their profile for you to actually reach that customer.

2. The demographic targeting does not imply purchase intent. It's a little

different than Google, for instance, with AdWords. One of the things about AdWords that we've discovered is that if somebody enters a search term, they're pretty likely to have some sort of purchase intent or interest intent. Whereas demographic targeting, if you say, "I'm from Boston, Massachusetts," it doesn't necessarily mean you're a Red Sox fan. You'd probably be in the minority, but it doesn't necessarily mean that. So there are some things about the demographic targeting that don't necessarily equate to purchase intent.

For instance, we had a campaign where we were trying to target engaged women who would be ordering a wedding cake and would be purchasing wedding planning services. It was actually a pretty small demographic target because even in a town of a million people, if you're targeting women between the age of, say, 30 and 35 who are engaged, you're down to maybe a thousand people in that target demographic who have entered that data into Facebook and who are available to you as a marketer. One thing that was really interesting about that particular campaign was that the advertiser insisted on running ads at that individual demographic. But we were missing the moms and the fathers and the


friends of the bride, all the other people who actually had influence over the purchasing decision in some way. The demographic targeting options, as great as they are inside Facebook, there are some gaps in terms of if you hold to it strictly, you're going to miss some of the people that might have a direct influence over a purchase decision. So you have to think, I think, a little expansively. One of the things that we've seen is that if people think expansively about their target market and creatively about their target market, they tend to do a lot better than people that are strict about hitting a very, very small micro-targeted audience. A really big key to all this is that the targeting is great, but you shouldn't necessarily rely on it alone to drive decisions in your campaign.

3. Facebook has some pretty finicky ad copy regulations. If you misspell a word accidentally, it probably won't get through Facebook ad approval. If you capitalize words unnecessarily or use unnecessary punctuation, it will probably not get through ad approval.

So you just have to manage these things and find out as you go. If you submit a few pieces of ad copy that don't get through, you might be a day or two late in submitting an ad, so you have to watch out for the ad copy regulations.

4. Advertisers still cannot target a user's status updates inside Facebook, although I'm convinced this will change. But as of now, you cannot do that, so that may be better for ultimately doing some sort of purchase intent targeting down the road.

5. There's no mobile advertising or targeting available, still. 6. Ads don't appear in mobile iPad versions as of yet. We think that will

change. It hasn't changed yet, so you can't actually target mobile users inside Facebook yet.


7. It does require significant work to manage, administer, and optimize ad campaigns.

8. Deep A/B testing is a very manual process. Every little individual ad

that you run, let's say in that example where there's a hamburger and sunshine, you would actually have to submit that ad twice to Facebook and get them both approved individually.

So if you're trying to do male versus female, age demographic targeting, interest targeting, and trying to run different types of ad copy and pictures, as you can tell, all those permutations would get way out of hand very, very quickly. All of that is a very manual process using Facebook Ads tool today.

9. Facebook doesn't offer a lot of help or assistance with landing pages or conversions, so if you're businesses and you're interested in converting customers or selling and doing e-commerce and all that, you have to go through third-party systems to take advantage of those things.

10. There are questions on Facebook Ads regarding effectiveness and

direct and immediate return on investment just because it's not quite as transactional, I think, as Google AdWords. I think a lot of people are making a lot of sense of it and taking advantage of it and doing a good job with it, but there's no sort of ROI calculator built in to the Facebook Ads interface as of yet.

Things We've Learned Let's wrap up with a few things that we've learned as a business that has managed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Facebook Ad campaigns, if not thousands, for different customers along the way. Best Practices I put this presentation together for all of you to take away as something you could download and use as a resource if you do dive into Facebook Advertising yourself.


These best practices are pretty consistent: Make ads interesting to the target market. Do not be boring, do not be

dull, and do not be afraid to be funny, humorous, or even a little bit controversial. I would say for those of you that are consultants that are out there working with customers and clients, obviously be very, very careful.

Make the ads actionable for the target market. The demographic targeting I was telling you about before to be

cautious about that. Don't just rely on the demographic targeting because as great as it is, you're missing the influencers that will not fall into the same demographic groups.

Make sure there's a call to action. That's a critical, critical component

here. We've seen it happen far too many times that someone will see an ad, but it won't get clicks because it doesn't actually have a call to action. There's nothing compelling about the ad that makes someone want to take the next step.

Eye-catching images are really important. As more things happen

inside games, and as more things happen in the news feed, people's eyes are sort of trained to go left on the screen and not right towards the ads. Eye-catching imagery will help you drive up your click-through rates and performance of Facebook Ads, no question about it.

We recommend at least 10 ad impressions per person in the target

market before drawing conclusions. I actually typically run ad campaigns with 30-40 impressions per person before I really feel like those things begin to fatigue. We're putting together more and more data as time goes on just to try to measure: when does fatigue take place? That's, at least in the beginning, how those numbers are beginning to shake out.

Rules of Thumb


The more local and the more targeted you get, the more expensive the ads get. So just be careful with that because you can have expensive Facebook ads if you get too obsessive about targeting. We typically recommend at least a target market segment of 10,000 people. That tends to work well. When you get less than that, results start to get pretty unpredictable and not necessarily statistically valid. Experimentation and measurement, those are really the two keys if you're doing these things on your own. Success Criteria Finally, in terms of success criteria, good offers, eye-catching imagery, good demographic fit, good call to action, good landing page – those things throughout the entire cycle tend to work really well with Facebook ads. Bad scenarios are when you're guessing or when your target market is really difficult to reach and you haven't quite found the equation. Those scenarios are tough. If you have a bad landing page or unclear ad copy, or if you're asking somebody to make a really expensive purchase that they're not necessarily ready to make and you're tracking conversions on the end, those things can be really tough for Facebook Ad users. For people who are responding to those ads, it can be really tough for those people to make that leap. So you just have to proceed cautiously in those kinds of scenarios. Tools Necessary for Big A/B Tests I don't know if any of you have used AdParlor, but it's a great tool for auto-submitting campaigns of different A/B criteria. I'm a big fan of AdParlor. You pay a little bit extra – up to about 10% in addition to what you pay for Facebook Ads – to optimize those things using a tool like AdParlor.


But for people that have bigger ad spends, it can be a tool that will save you a lot of time and give you a lot of insight for not a lot of incremental money. I'm a big, big fan of AdParlor. There are a few other providers of that service out there, but that's just the one that we've worked well with. I think Social Ads Tool is a European one that works really well that I've looked at. There are several out there that will help automate the process of submitting individual ads for the sake of running A/B tests and multivariate tests. Spreadsheets Critical to Analyze Data Then we put all the data that we get for these different campaigns into very, very detailed spreadsheets that have rows and rows and columns and columns. This is just a snapshot of some things that are going on right now. We're tracking weekly cost per click and weekly impression cost and what we promised to different customers along the way. We use Excel to really help us automate watching the health of campaigns more so than Facebook's own tools. That way, we can cut the data, we can take a look at how things are performing, and we can make changes that we see fit. Don't Overestimate Targeting Then in terms of the over-targeting, I'll give you a final point here about that. We actually have not seen the effective cost per clicks drop significantly for targeted ads, so for most of the people that we deal with who have done highly targeted Facebook Ad campaigns, we've not seen the click-through cost do significantly better. Then in terms of actual conversions, we haven't seen that do much better either.


So I think it just sort of lends more credence to the concept that there are a lot of influencers around a person that are just as valuable in terms of targeting as going directly to that market segment yourself. So just be careful with overestimating the value of Facebook targeting. I've blown through a ton of stuff. I hope you have some questions because we've got some time for it. Thank you again for being here, and I'd love to hear any questions or comments you guys have. Chris Treadaway • Social Media Buy www.socialmediabuy.com Questions and Answers Mike Stelzner: Hey, Chris, great job. Thank you so much. I've got two quick questions. First of all, what's your

take on using Facebook Ads to grow your fan page base? Is there more value for bringing fans in via ads versus organic growth? I'm just curious what your take is on this.

Chris: We've helped folks with and without ads for that.

There are new Facebook Ad options – I forget what they're calling them because they change the names on these things it seems all the time. But there's a type of Facebook ad that I covered in one of the earlier slides about trying to reach friends of people who have liked a particular property.

Think for a moment about a property that a mom

might be interested in. Take Chef Boyardee, for instance, which is a ConAgra property. They have a community site called Club Mum that they've done a really good job of marketing.

One of the things that might make sense for them is

to run the ads where friends of people who have


"liked" that property would just see a little Sponsored Story in the upper right-hand corner saying, "Hey, Julie likes Chef Boyardee Club Mum." That's a really easy way to pop something into the view of a friend who may very well be a mom if you consider moms probably are friends with a lot of other moms.

I'm a really big proponent of that. We had a

campaign that we ran for a major publication recently around its professional sports team. We ran that kind of ad, and we ran it compared to just a regular Facebook ad where we were promoting a page. And that ad performed about 330% better.

That's a new ad type that Facebook has made

available. It's highly targeted, and friends of people that like that particular sports team may not have liked the property, and so we help bring those two things together using that ad type. So I'm a big fan of using Facebook Ads to drive up fan count.

I don't know if those of you who pay attention or

read a lot of the tech and social blogs saw Gary Vee's comments the other day about social ROI being "a marathon, not a sprint." If you think that Facebook pages are here to stay and you can acquire fans for a few bucks apiece, do you think the lifetime value of a fan is more than, say, three or four dollars?

For most people that I deal with who think in terms

of lifetime value, they think that fans may be worth $30, $40, or $50 apiece or more, depending on the type of company they're in. So if you can go and acquire those fans today at a few bucks apiece running optimized ad campaigns, that could be a really inexpensive way for you to get your foot in the door on Facebook.


Mike Stelzner: Video ads, can they happen or no? Chris: They can. It's been more, though, through the

Facebook Ads sales force than actually doing those things yourself. Now, you can technically promote a YouTube URL in a Facebook Ad.

Mike Stelzner: That will display the video in the ad? Chris: No, it will just send people to that destination. If you

want a video inside, you have to deal with Facebook directly.

Participant: Actually, I'm glad that Mike mentioned something

about video ads. If you have video ads, that's something that you have to do inside Facebook? Huggies, I don't know how they did it, but they're running an ad here in Puerto Rico, and they're the only ones I've seen that actually have a clickable video. You click on it, and it pops up on your Facebook wall and you can actually see this video ad that they're promoting.

I said, "I can't believe we already have video ads,"

and I went back to the back part of Facebook where you configure ads, and there's nowhere that you can configure a video ad.

Chris: Right, you can't do that self-serve. That's something

in all likelihood – and I'm speculating here – but Huggies probably had a big ad buy. They probably threw Facebook a pretty big check and Facebook surfaced some video ads for them.

Participant: I believe this probably depends on how big the

budget is you can spend, but do you recommend CPM or CPC? I run all my ads cost per click for now. Do you have a preference?


Chris: It's a very common question and it's really going to

depend situation by situation. We've run some really effective impression-based ads just because we've seen the ad copy was right, the targeting was right, and the demographic group was right.

I'll give you a prime example. There was a group that

was marketing clinical trials on acne medication for teens. Think about that kind of thing. It's an embarrassing problem for some teens. They might not want to deal with people directly or in person about the issue, but if they can fill out a form and get contacted, show up somewhere, and participate, it might be a really good way to handle that.

We ran an impression-based campaign for that. It

had an extraordinarily high click-through rate and we're basically generating sign-ups for this group at something like $1 apiece in a local market. It was an unbelievable campaign. But it was because everything fit.

Then there are other times where it doesn't look like

it'll be a good fit from an impression perspective. Those are cases where we end up opting for clicks.

Participant: Can you target people who "like" a page or a group

that you are not the admin of, and if yes, how do you do that?

Chris: It's "Interests" inside the self-serve interface, so

that's pretty much how you would go about doing that. It kind of works. It's another one of those things – I hate to say this, but a lot of these things are really on a case-by-case basis.


There are a few tricks and things that I shared with you guys today, but in a lot of cases as well, you have to run these things, see what happens, and then adjust. It's experimentation you've got to get familiar with and comfortable with and get your colleagues comfortable with it if you're in a corporate purchasing situation or something like that because you're not going to go into it knowing all the answers. We typically don't, but we know how to adjust rapidly, and that's where we tend to come in.

Participant: If you are unable to target a zip code, what are the

geography parameters: city, state, and region? Chris: You can go city, state, region of the country. You can

go nation by nation. This zip code, Facebook released it and I think there were kind of two things going on there.

First of all, there are a lot of people not revealing

their address, and that's kind of necessary for zip code targeting.

There's a zip code here in Austin, Texas, so we know

there are about 50,000 people living in it, but if we try to target it, Facebook says there are 300 people in that zip code. It's just unbelievable. It's just flat out wrong and we know it.

But it's in all likelihood because the address is not

entered and the IP targeting is not good enough to know within a block of where you are. So that's why we say, "Zip code targeting – hey, great concept. We would love to be able to do it," but it's not really real yet. It's close and it will get there, but for now, we tend to talk people off a ledge when they insist on zip code targeting. It's not because we don't want to


provide it – it's just that we don't want to disappoint them.

Participant: How do you know how many times you've hit the

target audience? Where's the stat found? Chris: In your ad reports, you will see "Frequency," the

number of times that you've hit each individual person in the target demographic on average. That's an average number, so you're not going to have a chart with: "I hit this person three times and this person 100." You won't have something like that. You'll have a rolled up number – it's called Frequency – and it's in the ad report on Facebook. It'll give you a sense of the number of times that you've hit them.

We tend to go to about a max of 45-50 impressions

per person to really make sure we've hit them with the message, and then we change ad copy to make some changes. But that's really about the max that we typically go.

Participant: Can you talk a little more about the Facebook

bidding system? Specifically, do you recommend matching the bid price and then adjusting the price as the bid lowers?

Chris: I think you can spend some time doing that. I haven't

seen a lot of value in making regular changes to the bidding. Facebook will only charge you basically up to what that spot is worth or those places on the right-hand side are worth.

It's not like Google AdWords where you get a lot of

value out of moving your cost per click up and down. It's a little different than that, and it's certainly different than Overture used to be where you could actually see the top five ad bids for cost per click.


Facebook sort of manages all of that themselves behind the scenes.

You might be able to save a few pennies on CPM or a

few pennies on a click-through basis now and then, but I'm not really sure it's worth the effort. At least, it hasn't been for us. We haven't really seen ways to shave massive amounts of money off what we're paying for ads that way.

Conclusion If your questions were not addressed, please feel free to post them in our LinkedIn group. You can access the group via your event login page at: http://www.whitepapersource.com/facebook2011/