Just how powerful is Facebook’s News Feed? One of the alpha testers of Facebook Exchange retargeted News Feed ads, Nanigans, said advertising on the site’s primary feature increased return on investment by 197 percent, compared with the right sidebar.
Lisa Raphael (left), the social media producer at Katie Couric's daytime talk show Katie, is one of our featured speakers in Mediabistro's upcoming Social Media Marketing Boot Camp, an online event and workshop starting June 6, 2013. Lisa will share a case study on how the hit show uses Twitter to build interest and buzz around upcoming segments. Learn more about our our twelve event speakers and register here. 
Facebook’s transition to a mobile-first company continued with great speed during the first quarter of 2013, as the social network reported that 30 percent of its total advertising revenue during the period came from mobile, up from 23 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012.
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.
Three years ago, you could drastically reduce your cost per click by just running a ton of ads. The mainstream pay-per-click vendors, experienced with Google, applied their same techniques to Facebook — multiplying tons of ad combos by headlines, images, and body copy. While that technique was positioned as smart optimization, it was really spamming the system with thousands and thousands of terrible ads. If a general message against a particular audience wasn’t effective, making 10,000 variants of the same thing wouldn’t matter.
Facebook shared highlights of its recent panel discussion on performance marketing in a post on its Facebook Studio blog.
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.
Digital marketing company Kenshoo Wednesday rolled out Kenshoo Social 2.0, the second version of its social marketing suite, encompassing campaign management and optimization tools.
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.
In an effort to help marketers better track sales, Facebook launched a new conversion measurement Tuesday, allowing advertisers to measure the return on investment of their Facebook ads by tracking user actions such as registrations and shopping cart checkouts motivated by people seeing the ads. It allows marketers to track when someone sees an ad on one platform and switches to another to make the purchase.
We recently sat down with Chad Wittman, founder of EdgeRank Checker, to talk about his company’s newest product — PostAcumen. Wittman talked about what PostAcumen can offer for major brands on Facebook and how it can solve the problem of return on investment.
