If you weren’t convinced about fb ads – even google using facebook ads to advertise google chrome.
So the Facebook Ads Team has been on a roll lately. Here are some of the more important changes and updates being rolled out to facebook advertisers.
New Ad Manager – It is being reported (via InsideFacebook) that facebook is about to start testing a new facebook ads manager. This is huge, for anyone doing high-volume advertising on facebook you know how big of a PIA the current ad manager is. The new ad manager will make it easier to add, edit, & manage facebook ad creatives. The new manager will have a slicker UX with in-line editing & search – which will no doubt make all facebook marketers live much easier.
Facebook Ads Bulk Uploader. Besides for the new manager, facebook ads will also soon be beta testing a new Bulk Uploader for facebook advertisers to use to submit facebook ads

New Facebook Ad Targeting
in bulk. Many many facebook advertisers have been begging for this for a long time – the current process for submitting ads is tedious and takes forever. The only issue i see with facebook opening up the bulk uploader to all facebook advertisers – is that the ad review & approval process already takes forever for some advertisers / ads — what happens when the number of creatives submitted multiple at a crazy number. Currently, it takes time to post an ad – so you make sure it is a good one, but once advertisers can post an excel sheet with 1000 ads – things might get out of hand. Obviously, facebook can just throw people at the problem – which they will probably do (but why haven’t they done this until now???).
In older news, (which i always cover over on twitter @facebookads ) Facebook ads announced more targeting filters for advertisers to use in the facebook ad system. the three new targeting filters are:
Facebook Ads Connection Targeting. This is a great targeting feature for page admins, group officers, event admins & application developers. Connections targeting gives you the option to target fans, or members of your Group, or users who have RSVP to your Event and/or users who have authorized your Application. This was a long requested targeting option and welcomed by many facebook marketers.
Facebook Ads Multiple Country Targeting. Everyone knows that Facebook has a global audience – but previously, the only way to target multiple countries with the same ad was to create the same ad for each country you wanted to target. That is no longer the case and facebook advertisers how have the option to choose up to 25 countries to target one facebook ad to.
Facebook Birthday Targeting. Nice little targeting feature that im sure has facebook affiliate marketers jumping for joy. Facebook advertisers now have the option to target ads to users (in their target audience) on their birthday. Seems like a great way to get a nice high CTR% – offering a birthday specific promotion.
All in all Facebook is very clear that the Facebook Ads Program is very important & is giving it the attention it deserves. Now if only facebook would announce the Facebook Ads API….
What are your favorite new facebook ads features & targeting options??
~FBADS
Facebook search will one day be very important to the facebook ads program. The funny part is you almost never hear anything about facebook search in general and especially when it comes to the ad platform.
If i had to guess they got a team of people over at the new facebook headquarters, working like crazy on search. Ever since their latest redesign that was designed to push users to share more and more with the front and center “whats on your mind” box with quick links to add; links, photos, video. With all that data from the crazy amount of users on facebook, we should be able to be doing very advanced searches – something like what friendfeed already has.
If i had to guess, they are waiting for more people to start sharing more publicly (meaning not just to friends, but more like twitter – which is by default set to share with everyone). Once they start getting all that data & organized – they will have a very very powerful Facebook Search product.
Now Facebook Search will be very powerful tool for the end user but maybe even more powerful for the Facebook Ads Program. Imagine if facebook could start generating tons of searches on facebook.com – forgetting about click-data, but they will have all the current demographic data they already have + search engine data and how it is being used by what users.
Try this senerio on for size;
Ad Buyer: Can you pls show my ad to people in NY, who are male, between 18-35, make 100k plus and search for “XYZ”.
Google adwords rep: hmmmm, how about just everyone in ny???
facebook search ads reg: sure, just use the self-serve facebook ad program.
Now this is the just the tip of the iceberg, how about if i can i tell the facebook search ads program that i only want my add to show up when a user searches for & that user already “visited” and “liked” one of my competitors sites (which would be able to easily by supplying a list of links i want to target). What do you think the cpm or cpc is worth on something that targeted??? …. let me tell you, crazy high!
But like i said it is very surprising you hear noting about facebook search in the news/blogs. Especially when search is suppose to be twitter’s golden egg.
What do you think about Facebook Search? Where do you see it going? What implications will it have on the facebook ads program?
let me know in the comments
~FBADS
Wow, Facebook really knows how to stay in the news. Hey i love it, bec i get to spin everything and hatch my (sometime crazy) theories on the future of the fb ad platform.
About a month ago facebook told us that they will soon let users sign up & login to the site via OpenID. And now they do! While this is obviously the beginning of a full rollout – they have integrated and made live the open id support with Gmail. Starting today you can go to facebook and set up a new account with your gmail account.
There is a great write up on the announcement over at InsideFacebook – check it out.
So what does this mean? For Facebook? For Facebook Ads?
Its means that the one internet company growing like a weed on A-Rod’s steroids is facebook – and now they are putting the pieces in place to let anyone come with any sort of online profile (OpenID will be everywhere in a few years) and signup / login in seconds. Yep, so the weed grows even faster / bigger / stronger.
Now on the Ads side they are just shoring up more and more users that = more and more impressions. More impressions, means more data, more data means better targeting and better targeting = better monetization & ad performance.
Oh and pls dont tell me how not everything facebook does is about thier ad product. Ads are how they plan on funding Mr Zuckerberg’s vision of this next gen social graph / social app. And guess what, its working – Techcrunch is reporting that facebook turned down a VC round at 8 billion valuation & there are rumors that they will do 550 million revenue in 2009. Guess what is generating that 550 million dollars – thats right, the ad product. enough said…
Another smart move by facebook. Im getting used to it
~FBADS
I like to think about the Facebook Ads program as an baby adwords. It has a ton of potential (just like adwords did when it launched), and looks like it will be one of the few “must buy online ads” (which probably only has 1 player currently – adwords, Goto then Overture and then Yahoo Search Marketing might have been in this list in the past but is not anymore).
That brings me to the post title; Something facebook ads needs to solve that google never had to.
First off, remember that 100% of facebook ads rely on something that facebook knows about the targeted users. From geography, to interest, to age etc – they have to run the magic formula using that data and post the (hopefully) targeted ads.
The Adwords search program is different where the ads are showing only showing when the user is actively pursuing the targeted keyword, and then the ad can only shown next to other links, ads etc and not have to worry about the ads showing next to anything other than some misspellings. Now i know that a large part of adwords is adsense where advertisers target contextually relevant content to show ads. While it makes alot more sense to compare facebook ads to adsense than the adwords search-only network — google is a “must ad buy” bec if a company is worried about where and how the ads will show up, then can opt out of the adsense network and still pay google a ton of money for web advertising. Facebook doesnt have that option and needs to figure it out.
The funny part, this apparently was something that plagued the myspace ad program that they subsequently fixed.
the post was prompted when i can across this article: Facebook warned to improve online advertising
here is the text from the article:
Advertising agencies have pointed out that marketing material is appearing in inappropriate places on the website.
The claim follows a news report from New Media Age that Tesco has stopped advertising on Facebook after its marketing material was found alongside groups which supported holocaust denial.
Commenting on the misplaced marketing, a Tesco spokesperson told the news provider: “It´s an extremely offensive group and we wouldn´t want to be associated with it.”
Guy Phillipson, chief executive officer of the Internet Advertising Bureau, said: “Facebook should take the lead from MySpace. It should have people or technology to ensure advertisers can exclude ads from offensive groups.”
Facebook said that it gives advertisers the tools to control where their marketing material appears and this includes the ability to exclude them from particular groups.
Meanwhile, according to Reuters, more than 200 million Facebook passwords have been stolen by phishers and spokesperson for the website Barry Schnitt said the company was in the process of cleaning up from the attack.
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Let me know what you think, pls weigh in with your thoughts in the comments.
~FBADS
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