Blog - Page 13 of 15 - BlitzMetrics

LinkedIn Newsfeed Ads vs Facebook Newsfeed Ads– we compared results!

On August 7th, LinkedIn released Sponsored Updates, allowing us to hit the newsfeed.

THE MAIN POINT

You’ll end up paying $6-10 a click, even if you have a killer CTR, since the average CPMs are north of $200. But if you have a high-end B2B target, it could be worth it. Facebook still has more volume by job title and company workplace target.

2013-09-13 19_19_10-LinkedIn Ads_ LinkedIn Ads Dashboard

IN MORE DEPTH

There are 3 million LinkedIn business pages (hat tip to Jason Miller of LinkedIn for sharing stats). Compare that with the 50 million Facebook pages, of which only a portion are business pages.

With Facebook, you can target down to the zip code, while LinkedIn lets you go down only to the city level.

Facebook has sponsored stories (targeting based on who you’re connected to and sharing friend activity). LinkedIn had this two years ago, but pulled it quickly.

The CTRs on Facebook and LinkedIn are similar– perhaps slightly higher on LinkedIn. But if you isolate Facebook mobile newsfeed, then Facebook wins. You can’t choose mobile placements on LinkedIn yet.

Neither network offers frequency capping or dayparting, but Facebook does offer negation targeting and custom audiences.

Facebook has the ads API and insights API, with the insights API easy to use and get access to. Facebook has conversion tracking and bidding to conversion. LinkedIn ads API and analytics API are closed.

LinkedIn show summary stats by seniority and company size– Facebook doesn’t have this.

Here are the number of folks you can target on Facebook by job title. Clearly a lot more blue collar types– a larger audience than Facebook by a factor of five.

And as you’d expect, if you’re hitting executive positions or HR, LinkedIn is the way to go.

These are relative ratios- Waitresses on Facebook outnumber LinkedIn waitresses 4 to 1. But on LinkedIn, there are 1,255 VPs of Human Resources for every one of them on Facebook.

Would you list your experience as a bartender on LinkedIn?

The cheapest and most ridiculous way to get people’s attention

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

I like to input text into sign generators. Then post these on Facebook to get the attention of friends and clients. Put your message on a church sign, “For Dummies” book cover, stadium megatron, supermarket register, pawn shop, post-it note, or even construction signal.

Be memorable. Be humorous. Especially if you’re too cheap to buy a real card or thoughtful gift for that friend or associate who has everything.

Mashable even created a list of their favorite sign generators.

And feast your eyes on a few hundred sign generators here, the motherlode of them. Don’t blame me when you blow a few hours playing with these.

My favorite is perhaps the church sign generators here.

There are a lot of choices. Just fill in some text. Even the logos are customizable.

If you’re a pizza restaurant, let fans customize a message on your pizza box.

If you’re in sales, amplify your message in a Facebook post that is workplace targeted to your custom audience. Snipe one person’s newsfeed.

Think of the killer marketing angles.

If you’re really enterprising, you can download the open source code and make your own generator on whatever image you like. Or pay a freelancer on odesk.com, vworker.com or elance.comperhaps $200 to tweak one for you.

Give it a whirl and post your favorites here!

Two ads, one pageview

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

The benefit of having multiple campaigns is that you can take more than one of the 7 RHS (Right-Hand Side) ads.

In Google, you can serve your ad in only one of the 10 spots. One ad per domain. But apparently Facebook doesn’t enforce this rule.

In outdoor advertising (such as on subway trains), a company will buy all the spots. It’s called a “take over”. Research shows that having one ad on each of twenty trains is less effective than having all 20 ads from one train.

Readers, do you think double-serving is a great idea or spammy?

Don’t ask Chuck Norris to fill out a web form, since he’ll never submit

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

And likewise, here’s a doozy from the folks at Marketing Profs today.

17 required fields!

Why have a razor with three blades when you can have five, PLUS an aloe strip?

The key to social lead gen in B2B is many lightweight touches over time– to nurture folks, instead of trying to go from first date to getting married in the same evening.

You have to think from the standpoint of the client, not from yours. Asking me for my phone number tells me an aggressive sales rep might call me or that my information is going to be resold.

I must want that guide pretty badly if I’m willing to fill out all that information.

To learn how to do social lead gen effectively, check out what Jason Miller and Preston Smith have to say.

Why you shouldn’t buy our software

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

First off, it’s just awful.

But the other reason is that you might not have enough data to have anything meaningful to look at.

We’re known for doing beautiful real-time visualizations (that’s a live link to 1% of everything happening on twitter. But for most companies, if we monitor your mentions real-time, you’ll be waiting a long time between tweets.

We’re also known for complex affinity analysis– to say people who like A also like B. Then we split this out by 92 different countries to see how your brand performs by language and geography. But if you have customers mainly in one city, only one Facebook page, and only one product– the fancy analytics here don’t mean a thing.

There just isn’t enough data there to do social affinity– it’s just not physically possible.

The same thing is true for small websites using Google Analytics. If there are only a few pageviews a day, there’s just not much analysis possible, unfortunately.

Some clients ask us to fudge the metrics to make them look good. We’d rather focus on taking rapid, intelligent action than to sweep things under the rug.

So if you’re a start-up or small business, focus not on big data, but on big action.

Then people will buy from you regardless of your name or what the pretty charts say!

Sponsoring, boosting, and promoting Facebook posts

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

So I promoted this post to see the impact.

2013-09-01 13_33_49-Dennis Yu - The conversion principles that only the pros are...

I got twice as many views. Of course, as a user (not a page’s promoted post or the boost post), I don’t know how many impressions I got. But anecdotally, I got 20-30% more interactions than I’d get through organic alone.

Thus, the paid boost likely reached folks who were slightly less likely to engage, since the newsfeed algorithm organically already does a great job.

My buddy Kevin Mullett experimented with the promoted posts when they first rolled out. He notes they supposedly last for 72 hours. Mine lasted for only 12 hours, perhaps because I have 5,000 friends and can use up the impressions faster.

What percentages have you observed when you sponsor a post? Do you get a greater ratio of paid to organic impressions?

Creative Ways We Use Custom Audiences at BlitzMetrics

By Dennis Yu 2 Comments

Custom audiences are one of the many Facebook marketing tools we use to do thoughtful analysis that makes a real impact. The purpose of a custom audience is to target your entire list or specific segments of your list exclusively but the application of custom audiences goes far beyond that.

To create a custom audience, prepare your list (or segment) as a single column .csv and download Facebook’s Power Editor plugin. There are several options for custom audiences: email addresses, phone numbers, user IDs, and app user IDs.

Keep in mind that you can upload different list segments and do all of the below for each segment – the level of granularity is up to you. Uploading your entire list can work in ad targeting and has some practical use with custom audiences but think about trying some segments like:

Customers who have purchased
Frequent and reoccurring customers
Hot leads and report opt-ins
Webinar attendees
Conference/speaking engagement attendees
Customers who came from various traffic sources (SEM, Facebook ads, display ads, YouTube, etc.)
Unsubscribe list (gray hat)
SMS text messaging list
Get creative – there are unlimited possibilities!

Alright, Tom. I’ve got my custom audiences uploaded to Facebook and I’m ready to do this thing, what’s next? Here are some of the more creative ways we use custom audiences internally at BlitzMetrics:

Analysis against social interests

If you take a look at our documentation on social affinity for ad targeting you can do something very similar with custom audiences. Instead of finding the overlap between your brand and a particular interest you can see how many of the people within your custom audience have certain interests.

Determining how social your list is

After uploading your custom audience to Facebook, you can find out exactly what percentage of that list is on the social network. This is very useful for determining how social these people are and in some cases can help determine if marketing your brand on social media channels will be effective.

Demographic breakdown of segments

Did you know you can also do demographic breakdowns of a custom audience the same way you pull ad counts for precise interests? How much of the list is men? Women? What states and regions are they from? This information can eliminate up to 80-90% of wasted ad spend and help create an ad targeting strategy.

Lets say you upload your hot prospect list which only contains leads that have opted-in for a free white paper and clicked one of your ads within the last 30 days (we can accomplish this with InfusionSoft). You might find that 85% of the list is women, over 50% live in California, and 100% of the list is between ages 20 and 35. Knowing this you can target exclusively women that live in California between ages 20-35. This isn’t only useful for Facebook either, but all other channels as well.

Lookalike audiences

Another feature many marketers ignore on Facebook is lookalike audiences. The way it works is you upload your list and Facebook automatically matches the demographic qualities of your list with other related users.

This helps get your brand in front of new prospects that are similar to your existing audience. There are 2 options for lookalike audiences: reach and similarity. Reach will give you a larger list of people to target but similarity will match the interest and demographic profile of your list as closely as possible, likely creating the greatest efficiency. Both are worth testing!

Lead nurturing

How well rounded is your lead nurturing program? Sales funnels, especially for high priced or high value items are not 2 steps. You need to provide value up front, then provide more value and thought leadership, then nurture your leads by staying on their radar. I don’t care what business you’re in, nurturing your leads is going to make your marketing more effective.

Then, when the time is right figure out how you can help them and take action. If you’re doing nothing more than sending a “thanks for signing up” email you need to rethink your strategy. Use marketing automation to regularly rotate in fresh prospects once the existing leads are lower in the funnel due to your nurturing efforts.

Did this post give you some ideas? You don’t have to use the tools available “as is” – think of creative uses to maximize your output, make your targeting more effective or more granular, and most importantly drive measurable ROI. If you think of any other uses for custom audiences I didn’t mention let me know in the comments!

When newsfeed posts go wrong

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

Chevron runs this post in the newsfeed– boasting of their 2.7 million barrels production per day, accompanied by picture of barrels as far as the eye can see.

“Pretty awesome when you think about it,” they say.

I counted the first 20 comments and every single one was negative.

Jon Loomer, Facebook advertising expert, has written often about newsfeed abuse— brands that don’t micro-target, let their frequencies run unchecked, and are over-promotional. Here’s his thoughts:

“Facebook users are very territorial when it comes to the News Feed. As brands, we are interrupting their usage patterns by showing something they do not expect to see. While brands certainly have been successful reaching non-Fans in the News Feed, we also need to be sensitive to the user experience when we do it. I recommend micro targeting and soft-selling while closely monitoring frequency and response for optimal results.”

We’ve spoken about how to calculate Earned Media Value in the past– multiplying organic impressions by an average CPM for your paid media. But in this case, is Chevron creating negative earned media and spreading hatred of oil companies?

Or is all attention good attention?

2013-08-22 14_01_28-BlitzMetrics - Big Oil

Facebook raised our limit to $75k a day!

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

For one of our accounts.

But it doesn’t mean that we’re going to spend that much more now.

Sure would be a lot of airline miles or points on your favorite credit card, right?

What card would you put it on and what you would like to earn?

Facebook in Brazil– how did our predictions from a few years ago turn out?

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

The social sphere evolves quickly, especially in the past few years. Fabio Ricotta of mestreSEO interviewed us back in 2010, and some predictions surfaced about where Facebook was heading:

Fabio: Dennis, can you tell our community who you are and some background information about you?

Dennis: Fabio, pleasure to join you. I am formerly of Yahoo and now the co-founder and CEO of BlitzMetrics. We do Facebook advertising for big brands and franchised companies. The beauty of being a speaker on the search engine marketing circuit is that I get to see a lot of interesting places. By the way, I love feijoada and have been to Brazil several times.

Fabio: Why did you pick Facebook? Is there a main reason for your choice? What about the sources that you use to learn more about this page?

Dennis: A lot of it was just luck from being there when the Facebook platform first opened about 6 years ago and to be one of the first developers when F8 (developer platform) opened in June 2007. The ad campaigns were so effective that we just kept growing. Unlike MySpace, people join Facebook because that’s where their friends are. And the people you see everyday are local. Thus, we have believed Facebook to the secret weapon in local advertising, even though most of the advertisers are big brands.

A lot of what you learn is just from experience and working with Facebook directly. Developers.facebook.com and facebook.com ads have good information, but a lot of stuff is just not documented yet.

Fabio: We have a problematic scenario here in Brazil where every company whats to create social profiles as many as they can, telling the community that they are “cool” and “listen” to their clients calling this as “social media”. Do you have any tips to the companies that what to listen their audience and get the most from them? Do you have any sucess case to share with us?

Dennis: Creating a bunch of social profiles on Facebook is about as effective as just creating a bunch of websites or creating a bunch of email addresses. Without traffic, Facebook pages, twitter profiles, wordpress sites, or whatever destinations are useless. This is especially true in Facebook, where the number of connections you have matters—it drives how often you show up in the news feeds of others. The quality of your posts, measured by engagement rate, is also critical, as described by Facebook platform engineering

Here are a few good case studies, covering a range of big brands to small businesses:

How We Got To 40,310 Facebook Fans In 4 Days

How A 13 Year Old Gained 16,000 Fans In 96 Hours

The Most Powerful Secret In Facebook Ads

The Single Critical Factor For Successful Advertising On Facebook

Why Is Facebook The Secret Weapon For Local Online Advertising

Fabio: One of the latest ComScore press releases shows that Orkut still leading the Brazil’s social network market, but it shows that Facebook still growing. Do you think that this is the right moment to focus on Facebook and to build a community on Facebook because there are less competition? If you were working here in Brazil, what would you do?

Dennis: You want to be where your users are—to spend resources in direct proportion to that. If you are targeting just folks in Brazil and want to place more emphasis on Orkut, great. Open Social allows you to build some great apps if you have the expertise. But if you don’t, you might want to use social widgets from Facebook and build some Facebook pages. That’s very easy to do. If you’re targeting a worldwide audience, then consider what the right mix is there, also based on traffic.

Fabio: What you think about this recent partnership between Microsoft and Facebook? Do you think they can beat Google when we talk about social signals to power the organic results? Is there any special value to Facebook when we see a huge company like Microsoft creating a partnership with an young company?

Dennis: I don’t see Google and Facebook as direct competitors. Rather, Google is competing against the yellow pages (which is about direct search intent), while Facebook is competing against the TV set (which is where people go to hang out). Do you see anyone on Facebook searching in the search box for “discount automobile insurance”? Do you see folks on Google looking for what their friends are up to? The bigger picture is that offline media is shifting online, not that online players are fighting one another.

In the case of search, I think that Microsoft is sharp and well-funded. They are not trying to “beat” Google, in my opinion, because they aren’t competing head-on. Microsoft wants to be the “decision engine”, which would imply influencing people based on recommendations and conversion relevant information. Considering that people rely upon friends as a purchase filter, incorporating social results into search makes a lot of sense here. Google has failed here in the past.

Fabio: Some websites are already using terms like “Facebook SEO”, is it soon to talk in this direction? If the answer is “no”, what are the main strategies to work with?

Dennis: It’s true that a well-optimized Facebook page will index well in Google. I wrote an article about that here. Some SEOs are talking about keyword stuffing Facebook pages or injecting keywords into content. That is misguided, as the search analogy doesn’t work in social. Social is about people that are connecting to one another, as opposed to websites that are linking to one another. The dynamic is different. In Facebook, we’re looking for gathering dominant influence, which is independent of page titles, backlinks, keyword density, or whatever else. You need rabid fans who frequently talk about your business—and to gather a LOT of them.

Facebook has talked about their EdgeRank and Post Quality Score algos, which is too detailed a topic to get into here, but we can cover later if you wish.

Fabio: Concerning groups and fan pages, Many users and companies have doubts which one to choose. Is there a simple guide to make things easier for them? Do you recommend the use of both in case of a company, for example?

Dennis: Easy. Use pages if you have a business or cause. If you have a person association (a group of buddies with a hobby), use the new groups. If you have or anticipate having more than 250 members, use pages.

Fabio: Do you see any value on Facebook ads? How they can help a company to get more conversions? Are there any good reasons move the money from Google Adwords to Facebook Ads?

Dennis: Facebook ads are great to drive awareness and interest in the AIDA funnel. Done right, it can drive extreme ROI on e-commerce or lead gen sites. People make decisions based on the trust of their friends. If one of your friends is a fan of a particular restaurant, wouldn’t you be more likely to eat there? That’s what Facebook does to help increase your conversions—to expose that endorsement. Advertising is a quick and effective means to do this, if done right.

You should allocate budget based on ROI and we find that Facebook advertising is significantly stronger than general display advertising. If you’re not getting ROI, then you’re doing something drastically wrong.

Fabio: Segmentation is a keyword in Facebook Ads. What are your advices to invest in this area to promote a fan page or a profile in the social network?

Dennis: Make your ads social. In Google PPC, you align keywords with ad copy and landing pages. In Facebook PPC, you align interests with ads with applications. Most of the folks who complain about Facebook ads not working are not creating tight targets, nor are they sending traffic to a Facebook app (they are sending traffic to a website).

Fabio: With Microsoft (Bing), Skype, and other partnerships… What do you expect for Facebook in 2011? Can you imagine some big changes that can affect us?

Dennis: Watch for a stronger rollout of Facebook Places and more tools that enable advertisers to link their ads and pages together. Consider what is available in the Google AdWords Editor and that is my prediction of what will be in the Facebook ad interface, except with some social twists. We also believe that 2011 will be the year of “gamification”, where Farmville-esque dynamics will play into the real world.

Readers, what do you think? Did the predictions come true?