A good alternative to normal PPC advertising through Google, Yahoo and MSN (“The Big 3″), is to try Facebook. There are three primary reasons why I like Facebook advertising:
1. It’s a different model.
Instead of targeting a broad range of search terms to an unknown demographic, I am targeting specific interests on specific profiles that fit my criteria. If I am running an ad for golf clubs, and you are not a golfer per your profile, then you probably won’t be seeing my ads. It’s like uber-targeting. Sure, you can do targeted placements in Google AdWords, but it’s not the same as targeting what specific things people like/don’t like.
2. It has referent power.
When we look at the “circles of trust” related to why people buy, the inner-most circles are are the reasons why – personal experience, or someone you know told you about their experience. So here’s the cool thing with Facebook. If you set up your company page, and get your customers, friends, etc. to “Fan” you, when the ads run and appear on someone’s profile, if one of their connections is a “Fan” of your page, they will appear above the ad kind of like an endorsement.
3. It’s really easy to set up
Google and Yahoo have built complex systems that require tons of maintenance, and are difficult sometimes to maneuver around. They are great if you want to run hundreds of ads with thousands of keywords, and multi-layer targeting. With Facebook, you can literally start running a few ads in less than 5 minutes, and get some decent results. Here’s how you do it:
Step 1: Determine what you want to advertise, and create the first ad.
I thought I would promote myself on Facebook by creating an ad that would target Marketing Managers, VP’s of Marketing, etc., by letting them know that we are results-based analytics firm. I can upload an image if I want, like a logo or creative banner.
Step 2: Select your audience.
Now, this is the cool part. Not only can I select what part of the country I want, by age, sex, marital status, education, and even job title. You can’t target like this in Google or Yahoo. So for my little ad experiment, I can reach 31,640 people who could be interested in my ad. With Google or Yahoo, you end up throwing out this huge catch-all net to see who will click on your ad based on search volume, which can be wasteful.
Step 3. Select bid method and pricing.
This works similar to Google, Yahoo and others, so if you are already familiar with CPC and CPM bidding, this is pretty much the same. What’s also neat is that they give me a range for my suggested bid. I haven’t run enough ads to know if this is truly the low and high bids (I suspect not), but you can get a pretty good sense of what this would cost.
And that’s about it! The next screen basically reviews your ad, and authorizes payment via credit card. They have Facebook Insights where you can measure the performance of your ads, and get all kinds of demographic data on the people who clicked on them. If you need help setting up a PPC strategy for your company, let us know.
Update – January 13, 2009:
After using this platform for sometime now, even though it’s performing nicely for some of our clients in terms of cost per conversion, I feel that I also need to point out it’s limitations:
1. There is no conversion codes to place on your “thankyou” page like Google and Yahoo. You basically have to go into your analytics reports and view by source, and then segment by goal completions. Even then you will have to do some manual math, or you can take the time to try and create a custom report, or advanced segment in Google Analytics.
2. There is no way to mange multiple clients. The interface is limited to one ad campaign per account. Both Google and Yahoo offer their “MCC” accounts, or Multiple Client Center. You will have to create a new account for each client – this is a real drag.
3. There is no user permission system. You won’t be able to give multiple folks varying levels of access to the account – it’s one account, one level of access.
4. There is no change log capability. If you’re like us, and you are constantly changing ads, target keywords, etc., you like a system that will at least track all of that for you and dump it into a .csv file at least. Not possible with Facebook…sorry folks.
So in a nutshell, while I am still happy with the results we are getting from the ads, I am disappointed that the folks at Facebook couldn’t make a more sophisticated ad platform. With ALL the people on it, and ALL the revenue potential, this is all we get? (But then again, have you tried linking your Facebook status update feed into your FriendFeed account? They bury the RSS, and then you have to right-click on the link to get the address – really?)
