Posts tagged as:

targeting

Advertising on Social Networks: When Eyeballs Don’t Result in Conversions

by Teresa Valdez Klein on April 22, 2008

A lot of the recent buzz in the tech sector has been about unsuccessful efforts to monetize online social tools via advertising. Google is losing money on their advertising deal with MySpace. User sentiment suggests that demographic targeting doesn’t raise the relevance of advertising, and clickthrough rates are low across the board.

It’s not that social networks aren’t playing a role in business transactions. Blogger Charles Hudson wrote that he routinely makes transactions whose impetus has been a recommendation from friends through an online social network:

Judging by the activity I see within my own network, there are a lot of my friends using social networks as social Q&A systems to get input, advice, and recommendations in addition to just letting folks know what they’re up to at the moment.

But that activity doesn’t translate into revenue for the networks, and advertisers aren’t seeing the conversions like they do with Google’s AdWords service. So what’s a marketer to do?

A few suggestions:

  1. If you’re doing targeted, self-serve advertising on Facebook, get as specific as you can. Avoid stereotyping your potential customers, all women are not interested in weight loss. Many men are not interested in having sex thrown at them all day long.
  2. Think about ways of rounding out your campaign to encourage echo chamber behavior. Everyone is after conversions these days rather than brand awareness, so be sure to link your ad to a landing page that drives conversions and also enables social sharing of product recommendations. Even if the user who clicks through to your site doesn’t wind up becoming a customer, you want to enable him to encourage his friends to visit via social mechanisms such as embedding a video in his MySpace page or sharing your landing page on Facebook because it contains interesting content.
  3. Consider building something useful — like an embeddable widget or a Facebook application that lets your customers connect with their friends in a way that involves your brand.

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Privacy on Facebook: What information does Facebook use in its new ad targeting system?

by Jason Preston on November 7, 2007

Ruslan over at AbuZant Web Goodies has picked apart the code on Facebook’s new pages service to see exactly what they’re using to target the new social ads.

Apparently he downloaded the javascript file that delineates the targeting variables (he posted the code in his post, but it’s long and scary looking, so I opted not to re-post it here). He sums up, however, that:

They are targeting the using “at least” information about:

* Your political view
* Your sex
* Your age
* Marital status
* Country, City and/or Region
* Education Status
* Workplace

This is really not that much of a surprise. Part of the reason everyone has been so interested in this new ad system is that it can rely on a wealth of information that simply isn’t available to services like adSense.

In a practical sense, I’d say don’t upload any personal information to Facebook that you don’t want used by Facebook to try to target ads.

But in a realistic sense, is it a problem that Facebook has all of this personal data, and is using it to target ads? Certainly if the ads are annoying or useless. But what if the ads are really really good? In other words, at what point do you stop trading privacy for relevant advertising?

ps. It’s not fair to say there shouldn’t be ads. If that’s the case, then maybe the question is “how much would you pay per month to use Facebook?”

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