Spruce Media, a Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer, examined the state of Facebook advertising in the first quarter of 2013, and reported mostly positive results, in advance of the social network’s first-quarter earnings call Wednesday afternoon.
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Facebook announced Wednesday that advertisers that want to grow their fan bases can now pay based on a cost-per-action basis. For instance, if brands want to gain more likes and are willing to pay $2 per new fan, they can simply bid $2 CPA and pay no more than that when users like the page through ads. This is only available in the ads application-programming interface — not yet in Power Editor or Ads Manager — but Facebook may make it available on those platforms in the future.
Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer and social technology company Ampush shared the details of a successful advertising campaign on the social network for deal-of-the-day website LivingSocial, in which it focused on domain sponsored stories and custom audiences.
We call it MAA (not MMA or AMA) — and it stands for Metrics > Analysis > Action. The idea is this: Sort to find the top performers, ignoring the rest. Don’t mass-multiply; spend a few minutes per day, not three hours once per month. Amplify what’s working by using different forms of social retargeting via sponsored stories, sponsored results, and custom audience targeting. Don’t waste time making reports, unless you’re in that type of company — focus on insights and actions. Software is nice, but expert action is better. Software can’t mask missing competency. Repeat these cycles quickly — you can get them down to minutes and multiple cycles per day.
Through custom audiences, Facebook pages can launch highly targeted marketing campaigns. Sister site Inside Facebook reported Monday that Facebook has launched lookalike audiences, allowing advertisers to target users who are similar to those in the custom audience database. Currently, this is in beta for U.S. users.
Marketers are always trying to figure out which kinds of Facebook ads will net the most bang for their buck, and a recent Nanigans study may have the answer. Nanigans discovered that page post ads (located in the news feed) easily outperform marketplace ads, which are featured on the right side of the page. The company found that page post ads in the news feed have click-through rates that are 45 times higher and generate 14 percent better return on investment.
Facebook is taking steps to provide more clarity to direct-response marketers on the effectiveness of their ad campaigns on the social network, announcing the extended beta test of a self-service conversion-measurement feature that it plans to roll out at the end of November.
