Update: April 11, 2013
Since I last wrote about Facebook advertising, the social media site has launched a number of new advertising products allowing targeting of Facebook users by platform (mobile-only and desktop-only ads). Yesterday, their Facebook Partners Categories was launched across both mobile and desktop versions enhancing their database of user-category associations and opening up the possibility of meaningful targeting based on additional criteria. Partnering with data-aggregators Datalogix, Epsilon and Acxiom, Facebook certainly has morphed into a wanna-be ad serving platform with this announcement. And yet, I wonder…
Look at this facinating recent post about Facebook’s vulnerability to Airtel Nigeria users freely connecting to Facebook and clicking on ads with the resulting negative cost implications for Facebook advertisers by by Dr. Harlen Kilstein.
Hmmm… we’ll see how Facebook’s users react as the ad to original post ratio continues to rise in their news feeds.
*********************************************************
With the stock price eroding, you might be asking… is Facebook advertising a good thing, or not?
No doubt about it, the rules have definitely changed on the monetization front at Facebook post IPO. We are talking “pay to play” in 000,000’s not 00’s now. Instead of advertiser messages getting to a majority of your fans, it is looking more (according to TechCrunch), like maybe 16% of a page’s fans are actually seeing them due to the Edgerank algorithm’s adjustments. [Too see yours, check out Minilytics tool].
Not to worry, Facebook says, now you can extend your brand’s reach with sponsored stories and with their Reach Generator tool so page-post ads will display on your fan’s ads sidebar, in their web and mobile news feed, and even on the member logout page. You just have to spend more. Ah the joys of struggling to make your shareholders happy at a public company…
I’ve done my own empirical analysis of Facebook advertising cost and ROI vs Google Adwords not to mention ad product comparison based on ad platform and product features and reporting. Not a fair fight in my opinion. From click through rates and cost per click to conversion rates, from the number of flexible parameters for ad serving to the granularity of reporting, Adwords is (at least currently), miles ahead of Facebook.
Need help with your social media advertising strategy? Give us a ring!