Archives for September 2010

Facebook Ads – Ad Targeting Will Dominate

September 30, 2010 By Arnold Tijerina

I wanted to write a quick article regarding some changes to the Facebook Ads program. As time goes by, they are increasingly becoming an easier way to dial in your target audience while not wasting any of your ad budget.

Notable changes:

You can now set a lifetime budget for a Facebook Ad campaign (instead of a daily budget). This is valuable to that person who really wants to dial in their ad spend for a campaign. Rather than have to monitor your ads performance and spend daily, you can cap off the spend for the entire campaign. Their system will evenly distribute your ads across the entire campaign.

Facebook started providing social context metrics to its advertisers. These metrics, in a nutshell, will show you your ads performance when presented to a user when the user sees a “friend” that likes the ad listed (vs. just the ad). This is a great start and, as it stands, Facebook allows some very specific targeting for your ads. In the long run, however, the introduction of a targeting method which allows you to target users with a high number of friends could produce some high-performance ads. Imagine being able to only display your ad to users who fit your demographic settings AND have over 500 friends… That would be something.

Yesterday, Facebook added URLs to ads that point off-site. This is great news for Facebook advertisers. What this means is that you’ll get less uninterested clicks by people clicking, going off site, then bouncing. This should result in higher conversion rates for ads as people will know, before clicking the ad, that they will be leaving Facebook to go to your website.

Facebook’s introduction of the “Like” button is also important. I’ve talked about this in past blog articles. It’s “Like” button is spreading throughout the internet virally. How does this effect a Facebook Ad campaign? Facebook uses the information gathered by “Like” button users to deliver more relevant ads by basically incorporating the user’s web browsing history into the equation. Yesterday,Facebook shared some statistics about “Likers”. People who actively use the like button have 2.4 times the amount of friends and are 5.3 times more likely to visit an external website.

Are you a Honda dealer that wants people in your PMA who have visited your OEM or competitor’s website to see your ad? I’m betting you do.

As Facebook Ads gets more dialed in, it will increasingly become more inviting for advertisers.

With Facebook Ads, you can target your ad delivery much more than you can with Google.

Imagine being a Honda dealer able to target your ads this way….

Deliver to users in Los Angeles who:

Are/Are not connected to my Facebook fan page and/or Are/Are not friends of someone who is connected

That are single/married/engaged/in a relationship

between the ages of 25-40 (you can even schedule ad delivery FOR their birthday)

Have a Bachelors degree or higher

are male/female

Have a specific keyword in their profile (Honda, in this case, or maybe even Toyota)

Work at a specific company (or companies)

Speak a specific language

Have 500 or more friends

Have visited Honda’s OEM website and/or your competition’s (whether its brand or dealer competition) website in the last 30 days.*

You can’t do that with Google but you can with Facebook and it’s only going to get MORE targeted.

As the viral incorporation into apps and websites and the migration of users AWAY from Google and TO Facebook continues, the targeting will only get stronger. You’ll be able to maximize your ad performance while minimizing your ad spend in a way that NO OTHER DELIVERY SYSTEM can offer.

(*Note: The bold targeting categories do not currently exist, but they’re coming)

Forget SEO. Try NFO (News Feed Optimization)

September 25, 2010 By Arnold Tijerina

Recently there has been all sorts of talk about the proper way to accomplish Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I wrote a blog article about it the other day.

Something interesting that’s been happening (in case people failed to notice) was that while people are still trying harder and harder to optimize Google searches (or just coming around to figuring out they should be), that’s exactly where people are spending less time at. In August 2010, CNet reported that more people were spending time on Facebook than on all of Google’s properties combined (including YouTube and GMail). This shouldn’t be a surprising statistic what with Facebook having about 500 million users and given the amount of time any particular user spends on its site.

So, the rage for the past year or so has been to talk about Social Media Marketing (SMM).

There are plenty of best practices, tips and techniques to make your fan page flourish… but that’s not what I want to talk about here.

Did you know that Facebook has an algorithm for what pieces of content get placed into a person’s “Top News” area?

If you don’t know what that is, the default view of the Facebook News Feed (where every user goes when they log in) is the “Top News”. Think of this as kind of a “greatest-hits” for the last 24 hours or so from all of their friends. Of course, you can manually then change the view from the “Top News” to “Most Recent”, which will show all of your friends posts.

So how do you – as a Facebook marketer – get YOUR content into a user’s “Top News”? – News Feed Optimization (NFO)

There’s an algorithm for that.

This slide is from a presentation give by Facebook engineers at the f8 developer conference.

What we have here is a definition of an “Edge Rank”.

Believe me when I say that I’m not a math freak or anything but essentially what this says is the following (short version):

Everything on Facebook is an object – status updates, photos, links, video
There are three factors that determine the “edge rank” your object is given which will determine the likelihood that it appears in your fans (or friends) “Top News” area.
The first factor is the ‘affinity score’ between the user (your fan or friend) and creator (you). How much and how often does this person interact with you? Do they spend a lot of time on your fan page? What do they do while they’re there.
The second factor is ‘weight’. Each type of object interaction is weighted. What type of interaction happened? a comment? a like? a tag? The more “interactive” the ..uh.. interaction, the more weight it has – so someone who actually types a comment is going to be interacting more than someone who clicks “like”.. this of course, gives more weight to the comment.
The last factor is ‘time decay’ which is simply how much time has passed since your object was created.

Weights are not always evenly kept, FYI. When Facebook launches new services, those objects suddenly seem to be weighted more than others (ie. Facebook Places) so jumping onto new features and services does have advantages.

With the potential that Facebook may start sharing the “Like” data with Bing, the official release of Facebook’s Page Browser, Google indexing Facebook Pages, and the “Like” button’s viral adoption on the web… You may find it easier and easier to get lost in the crowd.. just as it is, right now, on Google Search.

Imagine, for a brief moment though….

What if you had started optimizing Google keyword searches for your business when Google first appeared?

You have that opportunity now with Facebook Pages, Like buttons and NFO.

What will you do with it?

Search Engine Optimization: The Great Debate

September 22, 2010 By Arnold Tijerina

Let me start with this disclaimer: I am not an expert on Search Engine Optimization. (Thank God!)

That being said, SEO is definitely something that’s been around a long time and most businesses have come to realize that it is something that they need to be doing. There are many companies that will assist you with this if you can’t do it yourselves and all of them have different opinions on how it should be done, to some extent.

As evidenced by this fascinating thread on www.drivingsales.com titled ‘A Broader Look At SEO‘ by Dennis Galbraith, you can see that many in the industry have been debating the importance of SEO, how it should be done, the significance of Page One placement, and who an expert is and what that entails. It’s quite heated, which makes it quite entertaining. Is there a ‘right’ answer? I don’t think so but I’m certainly not going to jump in the middle of that battlefield.

This morning, I read an article about how Google Instant is changing SEO. (article)

It made me think about the world we live in and technology in general. We all know that computers and technology become outdated very quickly. I believe this applies to SEO as well. With the advent of ‘instant’ anything.. does all this bickering about ‘who is right’ really matter? Hell, by the time that discussion comes to a close, it may be irrelevant.

An article I saw yesterday (shared by Harlene Doane, editor of Auto Dealer Monthly ), was hilarious but had a hint of truth to it. Search engines (and websites.. YouTube Instant anyone?) are doing everything within their power to predict what we are looking for before we even know what that is. There are times when I’m doing a Google search and I really don’t know what I’m looking for (except in very general terms) but I guarantee that, as these forms of predictive technology evolve, I’ll certainly focus LESS on the search results and MORE on the INSTANT results. I’m going to start typing letters and look at what the drop-down box suggests.

I’ve seen far too many people ‘Google’ pages that would take less time to actually type the address in. I find it hilarious when people Google “Yahoo”… anyways, the point of this post is that, in my opinion, SEO is a constantly evolving beast. There are no right or wrong answers or strategies. Anyone who knows what they are doing (or teaches themselves) can apply basic SEO techniques to their business and Google will ABSOLUTELY help you learn and implement a Pay-Per-Click campaign (PPC). Trust me, they want your money.

Everything you do online is a form of SEO.. whether it’s writing a review for Amazon, posting something for sale on eBay, owning a Facebook, LinkedIn or other social media page, Tweeting.. well, you get my point. Just have a presence and be active and SEO will come naturally. If dealers or any business would DO things on the internet, SEO would be less of a chore. The problem is that dealers DON’T do anything on the internet, which is why they get dominated by companies that DO.

[Edit: If you want PROOF that just doing ‘stuff’ on the internet will achieve dominating SEO, Google search my name. You’ll have to go to Page 24 before you find AT LEAST 4 links that are not, in some way, related to or about me. Granted there isn’t much competition for search results of my name but I haven’t even TRIED to optimize my name on Google.]

I personally don’t care HOW it’s done (as I suspect most dealers also feel).. it’s all about RESULTS.

Oh, and when I can go to my computer, turn it on and it just goes to the website I want it to without me typing anything.. will SEO really matter? Just sayin’