According to data provided by AdNectar, branded virtual goods receive ten times the interaction level of their non-branded counterparts. That number references the percentage of people that click on or send a gift after seeing it. The strong results have driven numerous corporations to launch branded gift campaigns across numerous social platforms. AdNectar has now run campaigns for Fisher Price, Godiva, Gilette, Procter & Gamble, Trident Gum, and Malibu, just to name a few.
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Doritos has launched a new “advergame” which integrates Facebook Connect to pull user information into a choose your own adventure type advertisement. The advertisement, developed by BBDO and a number of other agencies (we are social performed the social outreach), lets the user find their way through a movie-like story about identity thieves. The most innovative implementation of Facebook Connect that I saw prior to today was the recent Prototype game trailer, which pulled in profile data to display images and information that only the viewer would understand.
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When the Facebook platform launched over two years ago, one of the first ways of generating revenue was by charging for application installs. Two years later, installs are still a relatively large business and at between 20 to 50 cents per install, Facebook ad networks are bringing in money one or two quarters at a time. Many clicks on Facebook cost as much as one install though so is it worth it to use Facebook to essentially buy installs?
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Want to target a single ad at both the United States and Iraq? While that may not be something you want to accomplish, it’s something you’ll soon be able to do. On Wednesday a revised version of my Facebook demographics tracking script started acting funny and after a little bit of poking around I realized that Facebook has revised their ad location field to let users manually enter countries rather than select them from a drop-down as previously was the case.
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Over the past few weeks, big affiliate advertisers on Facebook have reported a spike in fake clicks, but this is only part of where Facebook has faced challenges within its ad network over the past few months. The reason for the surge in fake clicks is a result of a number of things including the creation of Facebook ad scrapers that are being used to track advertisers’ ads on the site and what pages the ads are linking to.
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Want to make a lot of money overnight? Here’s how: set up a quiz application and throw on advertisements which promote IQ tests that you purchase through your phone and you’ll be headed in the right direction. That’s the current state of the Facebook platform since Facebook is not aggressively policing it. Yesterday I posted about the latest developer trick and a number of commenters came to the same conclusion: Facebook needs to enforce the developer terms.
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While Facebook applications are known for flashy ads that will use dirty tricks to get users to click on them, Facebook public profiles have been able to avoid having advertisements placed on them. According to AdAge article yesterday, public profiles are no longer virgin territory for sponsors. Us Weekly has successfully sold sponsorship to State Farm on their public profile.
So is the beginning of a greater trend? Read more
This morning I was reading a Forbes article in which the author, Taylor Buley, does some flawed math to figure out the ridiculous number of ads Facebook would have to display to generate $100 million. Taylor makes a solid point, with extremely low click through rates Facebook needs to attract tons of impressions to generate a substantial profit. Thankfully Facebook has billions of monthly impressions and that number continues to grow.
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Tonight we had the opportunity to check out some of the applications that Facebook is actively testing advertisements on. We’ve also included a screenshot of some of those advertisements below. So far Facebook is advertising on three Zynga applications (Heroes vs Villains, Special Forces, and Word Twist), the We’re Related application by FamilyLink, and one other unnamed developer who’s ads are in beta.
Currently the advertisements are similar to the ones you’d see on the sidebar except that the layout is a bit more horizontal. The key value addition is of course that these ads will be targeted just like their existing ads. Many ad networks that I’ve spoken to have been exploring developing their own targeting systems but in many cases doing so appears to be pointless now that Facebook has entered the game.
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This is a guest post by Mike Volpe, VP of Inbound Marketing at HubSpot.
I have been advertising on Facebook for a while, and have done a number of other forms of online advertising over the years. Currently, the big advantage Facebook has is the cost per click rates are still very low so you can get traffic at a lower cost than Google AdWords or many other sources. I have found that if you target the people and ads appropriately, you can get Facebook traffic to convert at about 2/3 the rate of AdWords, which given the much lower (5-7 times lower) cost per click, means the leads are still cheaper.
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