Facebook Advertising Grows Up

The Facebook Phenomenon

Facebook logo

Facebook is a phenomenon. When I need to explain Facebook to none-believers I usually say it’s the ‘New TV’ – it’s not a perfect analogy – but already, in countries like the UK the reach (marketeer speak for how many people view a channel) is already greater than most TV channels. In essence Facebook is a personal news feed that allows you to receive updates on what is important to your life whenever you want it. Whether it’s your friends, your family, your colleagues, your football team you can stay in touch with them via Facebook. Now with the growth of mobile applications and the Facebook mobile clients on iPhone, Google Android and Blackberry, Facebook can be accessed anytime, anyplace, anywhere.

Due to the exponential growth of Facebook,  the advertising functions have been playing catchup with more mature online advertising solutions such as Google Adwords and Microsoft Live. I’ve run a few campaigns and have to say they were easy to set up but the features and functions of the user interface were somewhat lacking and the statistics available were basic at best. What was great was the value to be had – the cost per click was excellent compared with say Google Adwords.

Facebook Targetting

Originally, the demographic targeting was excellent because Facebook receive accurate sex and age data on each user when they signup.  But the ability to show a relevant advertisement was missing presumably because the Facebook wizards were still figuring out how to solve the problem of aggregating all the information they have on each individual and figuring out what ads they would be itnerested based on the data available to them. Well now they’ve figured it out and I’m rather excited to give it a go. Just like on Google Adwords, targeting relevant keywords will enable your ad to be so much more relevant to users and consequently enable savvy online marketeers to gain higher click rates and more efficient campaigns.

Facebook Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking allows you to track activity on your website as a result of someone on Facebook seeing or clicking on your Facebook advert. In combination with your advert statistics like impressions and clicks, conversion tracking will help you better understand the value of your Facebook advertising campaign. You can find more information in the Conversion tracking guide

Powerful functionality that will enable advertisers to track their ROI on all campaigns better. Of course it’s copied from Google but that isn’t a bad thing – only in Beta now and they are very honest about the possibility of containing bugs but again it’s great to see this finally available.

So the setup process is like this:

1. Create your tags – with or without value and string data
2. Insert code into all pages you want to track as conversion
3. Wait a few days.
4. Downloading the new reports which show the information harvested.

Post-Impression and Post-Click data

Looking forward to using these great new tools and will report back once I have done so!