It seems that Barton called the twenty billion escrow for Gulf Coast recovery “a shakedown”.

The DCCC is not admitting to the facebook ad buy at this point – but we heard that the ads are projected to get over twnety million impressions today. The DCCC also set up a website to try and raise additional funds. http://www.dccc.org/page/s/barton

“The DCCC will hold these out-of-touch House Republicans accountable who have no shame when it comes to jumping to the defense of BP and Big Oil,” said Ryan Rudominer, spokesman for the committee.
The DCCC also says it is also “sending out targeted press releases to House Republicans and Republican candidates on the topic.”

I guess this is good for facebook ads, as we all know political advertiers love smear ads….

Have you seen smear ads on facebook? Send us screenshots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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…).