Facebook Ads Just Became The Biggest Lead Generation Network.

1 09 2009
Facebook Lead Generation Ad Unit

Facebook Lead Generation Ad Unit

Inside Facebook is reporting on a new Facebook Ads ad unit. The new facebook ad unit is an extension of the homepage engagement ads it has been running for large brands. The homepage engagement ads it has been running was the following 6 ad units; Facebook Event Ad, Facebook Video Ad, Facebook Gifts Ad, Facebook Page Ad, Facebook Website Ad, Facebook House Ad (as explained here).

Now there is a big difference between the new Facebook Direct Response Home Page Ad Unit & the homepage engagement ads mentioned above.  In all the older engagement ads – the user was taken off the facebook homepage and directed to an inside page on facebook.com or to an external website.  The new Facebook Lead Generation Ad Unit has the facebook user complete the facebook advertisers lead generation form on the Facebook.com homepage. This means facebook collects the form contents and passes them over to the advertiser.  I’m guessing that this is charged on a CPL (cost-per-lead) – so advertisers will know exactly how much they will pay for each completed direct response form.

This new ad unit is being tested by Chick-fill-A for free samples of their chicken biscuits. When the unit is clicked it launches a popup with the form & gives users the option to quickly fill the form from their profile info (side note, it is only a matter of time until this is the default option – where the form pops up & the info is filled, im sure there will be an option to change / remove the profile info – but it will be more opt-out. This type of behavior pumps the click to form-submit conversion rate – as the user doesn’t really have to do much).

This move & the pending full roll out of this ad unit will no doubt make Facebook Ads the largest Lead Generation Ad Network on the web. While the test is perfect for a foodservice company (like the free chicken biscuit sample from Chick-fill-A), don’t be fooled to think this wont make its way to the more profitable side of the lead generation business. Think credit cards, mortgages, local service professional and much much more.  Oh and just wait for the Facebook Ad Network & the Facebook Affiliate Program that was confirmed by its CEO – then you will be able to post these lead-gen offers on your site via facebook connect and share in the revenue that Facebook collects from the advertiser.

So, what do you think? Did Facebook just become the largest lead generation network on the internet?

~FBADS


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New Facebook Ads Manager, Bulk Uploader and more.

31 08 2009

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

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


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Facebook Advertisers More Than Triple

23 06 2009

Facebook said the number of advertisers using the facebook ad self-serve advertising platform has more than tripled in the last year. This is no surprise, but its nice to put a number on the growth – this way we can watch the pace it continues to grow at.  The way i see it, its still real early on – and you have allot of small and mid-size business starting to use facebook ads .

What i find interesting is how long it will take the large business (and their agencies) to get in the game. This is the exact thing that happened with google’s adwords ad product – early on it was affiliate marketers and small business. But over time the big brands understood they had to be at the top of the results for their key terms – and now pay through the roof to stay there.

How long do you think it will take for facebook ads to become a must online ad buy like adwords? What do u think???

Last thought… if facebook really wanted to grow the ad platform they would release facebook ad api ASAP!

~FBADS


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Facebook Search & Facebook Search Ads that are coming….

26 05 2009

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


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CEO Confrims Facebook Ad Network.

20 05 2009

I  have been saying it over and over again on this blog, but now you get it straight from the horses’ mouth.  SAI has some nice “nuggets” from Zukerberg’s talk at  Reuters Global Tech Summit.

On the future of the facebook ad network, Mark Zuckerberg is quoted saying:

“You can see over time us wanting to offer more ways for people to monetize their site and help out with that, and it could be a pretty natural extension for us to do something with ads or a number of other things that we’ve considered”

You can call facebook  allot of different things today, but one day soon they will be referred exclusively as an “advertising business” (just like google :)

~FBADS


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Did Facebook just open the floodgates (for more ad impressions)?

19 05 2009

Facebook OpenID & GoogleWow, 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


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Something facebook ads needs to solve that google never had to.

18 05 2009

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.

————————————

Let me know what you think, pls weigh in with your thoughts in the comments.

~FBADS


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Facebook Ads in Facebook Apps

23 02 2009

Facebook announced last week that it would start testing facebook ads inside facebook applications. Up until now facebook was happy to let facebook app developers monetize their applications with 3rd part ad networks – but with the current momentum of the facebook ads cpc / cpm program it a no brainier to add the ads here.

But this raises all sorts of questions to me;

Will advertisers be able to target specific apps?

Will facebook releases demographic data of users of a specific app?

Here is a big one;  once they are comfortable monetizing facebook apps with facebook ads – will they stop allowing fb app devs to user 3rd party ad networks to serve ads inside the facebook apps?

Can fb ap owners run 3rd party ads along side the same app that is running facebook ads?

Will fb ads monitize as well as other 3rd party fb ad networks?

Now, if you read the blog post on the facebook developer blog, they titled it: Sharing your best practices for making money on Facebook Platform – and they make no mention of the facebook ads inside facebook app canvas pages until the 2nd to last paragraph. They try to focus the post on building “real” business around the facebook platform and facebook applications. 

Here are the first 2 paragraphs in the blog post (click here to read the full post on the fb dev blog)

We launched Facebook Platform to give you the opportunity to create innovative new experiences for our users, and with that gave you the flexibility to monetize those experiences in the ways you best saw fit.

Since launch we’ve seen many of your applications grow from brand new applications with zero users to businesses with tens to hundreds of thousands or even millions of monthly users. And as applications have grown, we’ve been excited to witness so many of you building real businesses based on your users’ engagement and earning significant amounts of revenue via numerous models including advertising, sponsorships, and charging users for your (or related) services.

The post then goes on to link to some pages on the facebook developer wiki to help facebook app owners make the most out of the the “real business” they are building on the facebook platform. These links include:

Business Models for Facebbok Apps

fb app 3rd party monitization  partner directory 

Interesting articles on facebook ap monetization

So, while i do have some conspiracy theories about this (like i usually do) it doesn’t seem that they plan on doing anything game changing any time soon. I mean if they were about to ban all 3rd party ad networks on fb – would they really link to a directory of outside fb ad networks??? This will be every interesting to see how it plays out & what effect it will eventually have on the facebook ads program and eventually the facebook affiliate / partner program.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Here is a screenshot of the facebook ads live inside a facebook app (image courtesy of  AllFacebook  (a must read facebook blog).

 

facebook ads in facebook apps

facebook ads in facebook apps

Side note; While writing this post it got me thinking about my post from last week: Facebook Commenting Widget & What It (could) means for FB Ads - Here is another example of Facebook adding and adding to their demo-targetable ad inventory. While adding facebook ads to facebook apps might be a more natural extension of the facebook ads program than adding facebook ads to the facebook commenting widgets – they both have the same common goal = further the facebook ads platform and make it a must buy for anyone doing any internet marketing (which it might already be…).


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Facebook Commenting Widget & What It (could) means for FB Ads

20 02 2009
   

FB Comment Box

 

 

FB Comment Box

A little off topic here for this blog, but try to stay with me and my out-there theories…

So today, facebook launched a publicly available Commenting Widget for any site via its Facebook Connect program. This is a very powerful tool – as it gives the ability to any site/blog to allow their users to use facebook logins to post comments on the site. That means the site doesn’t have to convince the user to sign up for an account, fork over personal info, check there email and verify it etc etc. In this day and age everyone has a facebook account – and now if you have any desire at all to leave a comment on a site that users FB connect commenting widget, there is no sign up – you just login with your facebook credentials and boom  - you are verified and ready to leave a comment.

Now, you are probably asking – what the heck does this have to do with facebook ads (given the name of the blog – Ads on Facebook)? Well, here is what im thinking. If facebook can gain mass adoption across the web with this type of widget (which i think they will, given the points above) – they are in essence growing there “available impressions”. The elements inside the FB commenting widget are 100% controlled by facebook. While yes, you can change the background color and the such – you cant add any custom code or HTML to the widget (as most widgets work). So now Facebook has this block of code on your page that totally controls a (commenting) section of the page and can add anything they want. OK, so you know where im going with this – yes, they can use these widgets to display ads. 

Now, i understand that fb wouldn’t even dream of adding ads anytime soon – as they want as few obsicales as possible in front site owners so they implement the fb commenting widget. But lets look a few years down the line & half of the web is using facebook connect as a commenting widget – the same time fb is trying to pump revenue to prepare for and IPO… would it be so crazy for them to start placing their ads inside the widget??? Look at google, 6 months ago they didnt have ads showing half the products that they do now (maps, images, there are more – just cant think of any off the top of head) – and now, they are popping up everywhere google can put them. This is also how they started with search – ad-free until people “needed them” for search. Whats gonna happen when site owners need FB for their commenting system.

Or maybe, that havard drop out is even smarter than that & can use the commenting widget (and the other 100+ widgets im sure they are already developing) to create the adsense 2.0 fb-style. Its pretty easy once you got a million sites using your widgets – you give the site owner the option to add facebook ads to the widget and share the revenue via a facebook affiliate program.  And just like that, you double, triple your ad inventory… Couple that with the data that facebook can collect on your site – ie. the people who comment – what they like, what they do on fb etc etc. Damn talk about targeted ads!

Its amazing, that in this day and age – where it seems like the entire global economy is collapsing & the govt is about to take over the banking industry (if that doesn’t scare you nothing will!) — facebook keeps on better positioning itself to become the next big thing on the internet (oh, it already is…..). 

Here is a 5 minute video facebook put out that shows you how to add the facebook commenting widget to your site in 5 minutes.

Let me know what you think in the comments. Am i crazy? Am i dead on? Do you have some other ideas how they can use these “widgets” for future business purposes?


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Facebook Ads Minimum CPCs

12 02 2009

So a few days i ago i searched through the FB ads help center for any clues how they use CPCs (what is the minimum cpc? is the cpc only dependant on the max cpc & ad CTR (click-through-rate) – or is there a host of other stuff? is there a max cpc? can i enter a $100 cpc? etc etc etc)

Anyhow, i will document my findings in more detailed fashion with separate posts – but something just popped up in my facebook ads account that made me think of this specific item:

Facebook Min CPC

What was it? This:

 

Facebook Ad CPC Too Low

Facebook Ad CPC Too Low

So i see this message : 

Your bid on this ad may be too low. In order to get more impressions, we recommend that you increase your bid to at least $0.18. For more information about how bids work, please see our help page. Note that your ad is not paused and it is possible that you will continue to receive some impressions.

Now im thinking what, am i losing my mind? i know i read the minimum cpc is $0.01 – and i tried to set my ad to a 0.15 bid — but Facebook Ads is telling me no the minimum cpc for this ad is  $0.18. Now im guessing this has to do more with the history of the ad than any “system wide min cpcs”. But just as google loves to tell you the min cpc is 0.01, but you find me some terms that i can get an impression when my max cpc is at $0.01 (forget about a click…). Now i am almost sure that if i delete the ad (instead of lowering the cpc) and re-add it exactly the same – with a CPC of 0.15 it would have gone through and got impressions/clicks.

btw, since i was only lowering my bid to $0.15 & they only suggested a bid of $0.18  ”in order to get more impressions” & bec the ad was making money even at the old higher CPC i raised the CPC back up to $0.18. Although, i will be testing this in detail with other ads at which time i wont comply with their “suggestion” and see what happens. Ill report my findings here. 

This will be an interesting trend to track, if anyone gets this message when lowering a CPC or (gasp.) when starting a new ad – pls let me know in the comments.


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