People have been asking quite a lot about Facebook PPC.
While I’m not ready to claim real expertise in this yet by any stretch of the imagination, I DO have a few thoughts which I think you’ll find useful…
1) Facebook IS about the most incredibly targeted advertising I’ve ever seen.
The creative combination of interests one can target boggles the mind. (For example, for my emotional eating project, I chose to advertise to women, aged 35+, who like the Oprah Winfrey show AND Little Ceasers Pizza)
2) Facebook is NOT a search engine with a passing parade of people you can target with an ongoing campaign requiring similar management efforts to traditional PPC.
The ads appear repeatedly on Facebook pages, and the ads wear out very, very quickly. (You’ll usually see the click through rate of a given ad decline precipitously if you graph it over time using their tools).
Because of this, Facebook is much better thought of as “a poaching medium”… good for event marketing, or “skimming the cream” off of as many interest groups as you can brainstorm, but NOT for setting up an automated marketing funnel. (At least, I haven’t seen one yet). It requires VERY active management.
Also, because of this wear out phenomenon, in my opinion, the recent hoopla about Facebook replacing Google is much over-hyped, and you shouldn’t close down your AdWords account just yet.
3) To apply my marketing research techniques to Facebook advertising, you need to replace the keyword/adgroup with the Facebook interest group, and use the latter as your unit of analysis. In other words, rather than conceiving of every tightly themed keyword group as a different conversation in the prospect’s mind, think of the INTEREST group the same way. (But again, you’ll need to go back to that group with different ads after the survey).
Here’s another, more advanced, but more powerful way to make this work. Do your survey research on Google, but include demographic and interest variables in your survey form. For example, if I had included a checkbox in my GOOGLE survey asking “Do you watch Oprah?” and “Do you like Pizza?”, I could analyze the survey to find the unique language, needs, objections, and concerns of pizza loving Oprah watchers. Then I’m armed to the teeth when I target that interest group in Facebook.
Of course, the added twist is that Google needs to represent a specific keyword (for example, “emotional eating”), but there’s no point in advertising my emotional eating site on Facebook if these Oprah loving pizza eaters aren’t also interested in emotional eating.
I hope that makes sense.
Well, that’s the Dr. Glenn show for this sunny New Hampshire Sunday.
Hope you’re all enjoying the weekend,
All my best,
Dr. G 🙂