New Super Power Tools for Facebook Advertisers

by Shelley Ellis on August 18, 2010

Marin software is leading the pack when it comes to offering a Facebook advertising management option for agencies. It slices, it dices! Well not really but it does offer you the opportunity to split your original campaigns into much smaller, more targeted campaigns. That’s huge when it comes to figuring out which keywords are converting for you on Facebook. The reporting and bid management options are also very strong in their new system.

We all know that Facebook ads have to be changed and updated constantly and Marin has added an option for rotating out your ads to avoid banner blindness.

With the Facebook fad not showing any signs of declining any time soon, Marin’s new tool offers advertisers a “secret weapon” against any competitor who is still manually managing their own ads.

Another valuable Facebook advertising tool that just came out a couple of weeks ago is the Facebook keyword discovery tool, Cash Keywords Pro.

Here is the original MediaPost article that came out this week:

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=133864&nid=117722

Marin Software on Tuesday will make available a Facebook application that lets advertisers and agencies manage Facebook campaigns alongside those running in Google, Bing and Yahoo. Advanced features include audience segmentation, algorithmic bidding and ad rotation.
The inability to target keywords, rather than audience segments, has become a challenge for advertisers running hundreds of campaigns simultaneously. Rather than buy the keywords “sleeping bags,” advertisers might buy “people who like camping.” It makes the audience too broad and their interest in buying patterns may vary widely based on gender, location and other likes and interests.

The platform will allow Marin clients to take broad audience segments and break them down into hundreds of focused campaigns, according to Marin Marketing VP Matt Lawson. “Our software takes the original campaign and targeting perimeters to split them out into more focused keyword groups,” he says. “Let’s say you define 25 segments. The tool creates each segment, generates all the URL codes to track it, and manages the conversion data to place bids.”

Advertisers will spend $1.28 billion worldwide this year to reach Facebook’s more than 500 million users, according to new research by eMarketer. Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst for the research firm, points to Facebook’s self-serve ad system to the company’s success. Advertisers use the tool to create, buy and target the small ads that appear on the right side of most member pages.

But Marin’s Lawson believes Facebook’s ad system can target much better. Facebook marketers have to continually refresh their creative ads to avoid a drop in click-through rates. So Marin created a tool that allows advertisers to upload multiple images to a live library for a campaign. The tool takes the multiple images, text and headlines and automatically creates combinations, rotating through them to keep ads fresh and interesting. It aims to eliminate what Lawson calls “ad blindness.”

Marketers rely on Facebook as a place to engage consumers. With 63% of U.S. online adults on the site and a global reach of more than 500 million, Facebook remains at the top of many lists when marketers decide where to pursue their social strategies, but the size of the potential audience can overwhelm marketers and leave them feeling unprepared to engage, Forrester Research Analysts Melissa Parrish wrote in a report titled How To Create An Effective Strategy On Facebook.

For Marin enterprise clients, Lawson says it’s not unusual for each to run about 200 campaigns simultaneously. When companies manage many campaigns, advertisers need the ability to filter content and get alerts.

*Super hero image courtesy of Deviant Art.

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Identifying Anonymous Google URL’s

by Shelley Ellis on August 9, 2010

If you run automatic placement campaigns (keyword themed campaigns) on the Google Display Network, you have probably run across anonymous URL’s in your placement performance reports or through your networks tab if you are checking your stats from your Adwords user interface.
As if targeting wasn’t hard enough with automatic placements, throwing anything anonymous into the mix certainly doesn’t help from an optimization standpoint. Those URL’s leave advertisers flying blind with a lack of transparency on the Google Display Network.
I had the opportunity to interview Marc Phillips from Search Forecast about a breakthrough that allows Search Forecast to de-anonymize those anonymous Google URL’s.
Marc’s team is already finding ways to use this new information with clients but this discovery is so brand new that over the next few weeks, Marc and I will be digging deeper to see what this information really tells AdWords advertisers and to see how we can use it within the AdWords Display Network.
The interview is up on YouTube and includes a number of powerpoint slides. You can view it here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npn7e2vfxJk

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Mobile Video to Double Up, Reach $1.34B by 2014

August 9, 2010

With recent announcements related to YouTube and mobile combined with this article, well, I’d say now is a good time to get into video to enhance your mobile brand and advertising presence.
This article by Christopher Rick at REELSEO.com really sums it up (copied and referenced below)
http://www.reelseo.com/mobile-video-advertising-2014/
-Christophor Rick |   August 4, 2010
Remember some time back when Mark talked [...]

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Finding Placements Training

July 23, 2010

COMING IN AUGUST…
Want to know where the REAL opportunities in the content network are hiding? The places where you have the most power and the most control over who sees your ads? Want to know how those $50K and $100K a month accounts are tapping into the highest quality, most targeted traffic in AdWords?
The SECRET [...]

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iPhone App Marketing

July 21, 2010

Simple…easy ways to market your new phone application in this new video.

Last week, I had the opportunity to talk with several people about app-vertising and all new opportunities for advertising on smartphones and iPads. One of the areas I have been really impressed with is the development of phone applications that are both practical and [...]

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Some of My Favorite Books

June 24, 2010

These are some of my FAVORITE  content network and PPC books!

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Google Content Network -NOW- Google Display Network

June 18, 2010

Google has been making so many changes so quickly over the last 5 months that I can hardly keep up! That’s great news because it means new features and reporting in the content network (oops…I mean display network).
I wanted to give you the heads up that on Monday I will be sending out a survey [...]

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Check your AdWords account from your iPhone, Android or Palm

April 13, 2010

If you’d like information from your AdWords account streamed to your mobile phone, it’s now easy to do: Just direct your Android, iPhone, or Palm Pre to:
http://adwords.google.com/dashboard/Dashboard
(You have to be logged in to your AdWords account first.)
You can customize the information reports from your desktop computer first, and get the exact information you want sent [...]

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Limited Bonus for the Advanced Content Network Boot Camp

April 11, 2010

What if I could give you a visual map of the Google content network? A beautifully done, visual perspective of how categorization works on the content network. Trust me, you’ve never seen the Google content network like this!
Well…I’m GIVING mindmaps of the Google content network away!
The Advanced Content Network Boot Camp kicks off Wednesday, April [...]

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Avoiding “Ad Fails”

March 27, 2010

I was reading an article this morning about 23 amazing ad fails and it really bothered me that so many companies still don’t know how to avoid “most” of the possible embarrassing ad situations on the content network.
The content network has a number of ways for you to control where your ads are shown or [...]

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