Digital Marketing Blog

Facebook Advertising: Top 9 Reasons Why Digital Marketers Fail

 

We recently blogged about reasons why Search Engine Marketer's typically do not achieve their campaign goals when running an ad campaign on Facebook. We have further explored the common mistakes companies make when venturing into Facebook advertising for the first time.

Here are the points we mentioned in our first Facebook Ad Best Practices for Search Engine Marketers POV:

1. Facebook is not a Traditional Search Engine
Facebook is in a category of "people search" and "social search".

2. Campaign Objectives: Alignment
The typical experience by a search marketer who tries to port an Adwords Campaign into Facebook advertisements.

3. Having a Custom Facebook Page
Serve custom content the Facebook social network with a Custom Facebook Fan Landing Page.

Here are some additional Best Practices for creating a successful ad campaign in Facebook:

4.  Target Demographics

"Who is my ideal customer/target market?"

Most Search Engine Marketers (myself included) are so obsessed with keywords, ad copy, landing pages, budgets and bid management they've completely lost sight of the Marketing part of Search Engine Marketing.

Best Practices for Profiling your Target Markets'

Demographics:

• Survey your Existing Customer Base
• Analyze your Site Traffic using a
  3rd party tools (Quantcast, Hitwise, Compete, etc)
• Run Facebook Ads on "broad match"
  (i.e. no demo targeting selected); pull some Demo reports after-the-fact

5.  Audience Targeting

"Where do I enter my Keywords?"
Hint: It's a trick question folks keep asking themselves. (See the Facebook Ad Strategy Download)

We have to preface this by saying Facebook Targeting is extremely more sophisticated than traditional search.

Facebook enables you to laser target based on over a dozen settings at the Ad Level instead of campaign:

1. Location
• City
• State
• Country 
2. Demographics
• Ages 13-64+
• On Birthday
• Gender
• Interested In (Gender)
• Relationship Status
• Language(s)
3. Likes & Interests (formerly known as ‘Keywords')
4. Education & Work
5. Connections/Friends of Connections

6.  Ad Testing

"I thought Multivariate testing was only applicable to landing pages?"

Search provides the ability to A/B/n test ads at the Ad Group Level for optimization while Facebook enables you to Multivariate test several variables at the Ad Level.

Best Practice: test these variables using individual ads:

• Title
• Body Text
• Image
• Age
• Location
• Gender
• Likes & Interests

Hint: Name your ads w/these same variables to keep track of them when you pull some performance reports.

7.  Creative Burnout

"My ads work great for a couple days, then...nothing!"

Best Practices:

• Have lots of ad variations in the cue for testing.
• Refresh creative (ads) as soon as you start seeing diminishing returns (daily, weekly, or monthly basis)

Run out of ad ideas?

Here's how you can create over half a billion ad variations in < 5 minutes using variations of those same variables:

• Titles: 10
• Body Text: 10
• Images: 10
• Ages: 50 (Age 13-64, separately)
• Location: 50 (states)
• Gender: 2
• Likes & Interests: 11 (None + 10 specific)

Do the Math: 10x10x10x50x50x2x11= 550,000,000

Hint: frequent ‘refreshes' are required!

8.  Day-Parting

"My ads seem to blow through their budget."

Hint: Running ads during peak usage time(s) actually creates performance derogation (this is counterintuitive to the traditional maximize ‘reach' mindset, it's best to reach users when they are less engaged w/socializing). That's all we have to say for now as it's not a fully accessible option to most Advertisers.

9.  Bidding Strategies

"What does CPM stand for again?"

Not gaining any traction when purchasing clicks on a cost-per (CPC) basis? Try CPM!

 
Download More Facebook Advertising Strategies
and Best Practices

Best Practice: Backing into an effective CPC using CPM based pricing has proven to be more efficient and scalable

 

 

 

 

Need help with your Facebook Ad campaign?
877.736.4321

For more information visit ymarketing.com, follow @ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707

Moving at the Speed of Social Media...

 

The folks at Socialnomics have outdone themselves again. Their popular video Social Media Revolution has recorded nearly 2 millon views since it was in July of 2009. They just released an update (view video below) packed with new information like:

• Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in U.S.
• 1 in 8 couples married in the U.S. met via Social Media
• If Facebook were a country it would be the world's 3rd largest
• 50% of mobile Internet trasffic in the UK is for Facebook

Have a look at the (updated) video and let us know where you think Social Media is headed next!

What do you think? Where is Social Media headed next?

For more information visit ymarketing.com, follow @ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707

Favorite FREE Social Media Tools for 2010

 

It seems that there are more Social Media Tools on the market today than there are Starbucks, so it's more important now than ever to save time (and money) to find the tools that excite even most experienced Social Mediaphiles.

That's why ymarketing would like to share some of our favorite (and free!) Social Media Tools for 2010, in no particular order. Some of these tools have been out for some time, while others are brand spanking new. The purpose of this blog is to promote Social Media tools that will make your life easier and more fun, thus the categories will be somewhat random, but their effectiveness will not. Enjoy!

 

Great all-in-one comprehensive browser for real-time and social web. Tweetdeck allows users to open their Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace accounts all in one directory.

  Productivity enhancement service for Social Media users. Hootsuite Helps organize, schedule, and deliver content through Facebook and Twitter.

  bit.ly is one of the first, and still our favorite, URL shortener for tracking and analytics.

  Voice interface technology that let's you instantly acces your Facebook and Twitter accounts simply by speaking into your phone. Vlingo is a great hands free option for mobile tweeting on the go.

Allows multiple people to communicate through corporate Twitter accounts and stay in sync while doing so. No dropped balls with CoTweet, no stepping on each other's toes.

flickr creative commons search is a great place to find free photos (under a creative commons license) that you can use in blog posts, presentations, etc.

Great competitive intelligence for twitter is what Topsy gives you. Keep your social media ear to the ground with this excellent tracking tool. 

Want to see how popular you are on twitter? Wefollow allows you to view categorical rankings of who's hot on Twitter. 

 

 

For those of you who are interested in everything social media tools, and want a few suggestions of some great paid tools, here you go:

  Flowtown is a super cool tool allows you to take a random person's email address and quickly determine what social networks that person is on, as well as name, age, gender, and occupation. (I believe it costs $15 a month)

Dashboard program for your Social Media account, Swix promote it as Google Analytics for Social Media. We love the scorecard aspect of it. ($10 a month)

 

 

 

 

For more information visit ymarketing.com, follow @ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707

The Search for an Upset: Could a Perfect Storm Propel Kris Allen into the Next American Idol? | ymarketing

 

If you're a regular Idol Prediction Project reader you know we've been using Search and Social Media data to predict winners on Idol using: iTunes (purchase intent), Facebook (wall posts), Twitter, Digg and Google Search data... all with pretty good accuracy.

On Saturday May 9, 2009, Aubry, one of our blog contributors made this prediction in response to last week's post on who will be the ‘Challenger to Idol favorite Adam': "If Kris Allen exits this week, Adam will pick up a majority of his votes... Adam seems to be the #2 [favorite] of Kris fans and the young girls are Kradams. If however Gokey goes out, Kris will win because Gokey fans out and out dislike Adam." Could Aubry be right?

It's a lot closer than many people believe

On the May 13 results show Ryan Seacrest said, "More than 88 million votes were cast ... and only 1 million votes separated 1st and 2nd." If it's that close on a three-way race, and you assume that dedicated voters make up the majority of the "voting bloc", then it really comes down to: I) a surging Kris tightening the race; II) Danny Gokey's Swing Voters; III) Adam Lambert backlash. (And of course how the two finalists perform; let's not discount that important element!)

Perfect Storm Part I: "Heartless" from Allen tops "One" from Lambert

Kris is surging. Multiple Social Media and Search data sources confirm that fact. And his performance of Kanye West's "Heartless" Tuesday night may be a big factor. Past strong performances by Allen like his version of Falling Slowly "propelled Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova's 2-year-old original into the top 30 on iTunes' download chart," proving through purchase behavior that Allen does have market appeal. If only we could see the download figures for "Heartless"... anyone?

Facebook chatter (as measured by terms like ‘kris allen' and ‘adam lambert' appearing in wall posts) show Kris Allen taking a lead over Lambert for the first time this entire year. The chart below also showcases ‘kanye west' and ‘bono' for perspective on just how popular these two finalists have truly become.

Google Search data showed Adam with a nearly insurmountable lead (3X, 5X, 8X in some cases) up until this week, when tremendous acceleration for search terms featuring ‘Kris Allen' showed that lead severely diminished:

In fact, for the first time since we began measuring "breakout searches" on Google, Kris Allen posted MORE fast rising search terms than Adam (6 vs. 5):

USA Today blogs about how "If radio stations decided the American Idol winner this week, Kris Allen would have the edge. An early look at Mediabase numbers shows that Kris' version of Kanye West's Heartless has had 17 spins on 13 stations this week, barely beating out Adam's U2 cover, One, which 16 stations played once each." But if you total the Top 6 spins/stations, Kris has 22/17 to Adam's 18/18. Here's how the Mediabase numbers look for the week:

• 1. Kris Allen, Heartless: 17 spins/13 stations
• 2. Adam Lambert, One: 16 spins/16 stations
• 3. Kris Allen, Apologize: 5 spins/4 stations
• 4. Danny Gokey, You Are So Beautiful: 5 spins/4 stations
• 5. Danny Gokey, Dance Little Sister: 3 spins/3 stations
• 6. Adam Lambert, Cryin': 2 spins/2 stations

Other Indicators show the race tightening up as well. Globally Adam still maintains a lead over Kris, but the overwhelming distance that once separated them has evaporated:

On Digg, Adam's held a 4.5 to 1 advantage in the first week of May. That lead is down to 3-to-2 as of May 15, 2009 but Adam still holds the edge. Adam maintains leads on Twitter, YouTube and in the Blogosphere as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perfect Storm Part II: Gokey Swing Votes

The conventional wisdom "around town", and our blog contributor Aubry, seems to be that Danny Gokey voters are more likely to cast their votes for Kris than they are for Adam. But we attempted to substantiate that hypothesis with Search and Social Media data and found out that's a pretty tough task - especially since the relevant data is just 2-3 days old. A search through the blogosphere (Google blog search) produced a split: a roughly equal number of "Danny Gokey fan" blogs say they'll vote Kris and Adam.

This original question appeared in the USA Today Blog on April 27^th when they speculated that Kris Allen could be a "game changer". "The flamboyant Lambert engenders devotion or distaste, the polar opposite of the more conservative Gokey. Allen's base could shift allegiance to Lambert, who shares his penchant for tinkering with arrangements, or they could align with Gokey, who like Allen serves as a church worship leader. Where those votes go might well determine the outcome."

Perfect Storm Part III: Adam Backlash

USA Today reported on their blog that a backlash may be brewing against Idol's Adam Lambert and cited several factors as to why this could be: 1) Idol producers gave Adam the final performance slot three straight weeks, 2) Simon Cowell's outright prediction of an Adam win on Oprah, and 3) Simon's heavy-handed "instructions" to the Idol audience about not forgetting to vote for the "favorite", Adam. USA Today even characterized the backlash as more of an "anti-judge backlash."

Search data we uncovered seems to underscore this same sentiment. VoteForTheWorst.com has a self-described mission to "support voting for the entertaining contestants who the producers would hate to see win on American Idol"). Sounds like a good place to track negative backlash; so we looked at search engine traffic ending up at the site. Adam Lambert appears as the #2 term, responsible for 87 times more traffic than the first Kris Allen term, which comes in at #273 for that site.

Final "American Idol" finale thoughts

The data shows it's too close to call; not a landslide for Adam as many predicted a few weeks back. In betting terms, Allen is what odds makers would call "a live dog".

Just the beginning?

We searched TweetVolume for clues on the Final Two this week and knew Gokey was in trouble. Then for fun we contrasted Idol with Britain's Got Talent 2009 sensation Susan Boyle. Looking at that data, we couldn't help but wonder when are we going to see the Idol World Cup? Susan Boyle vs. Adam Lambert (or Kris Allen?). Pay-Per-View numbers would be incredible! And TXT volume would probably crash cellular networks worldwide!! Hey Simon, when you use this great idea of ours please remember to make out our royalty checks to "ymarketing, LLC", OK?

 

For more information visit ymarketing.com, follow @ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707

American Idle: Is Detroit Stuck In Park? What Search Engine Data Tells Us | ymarketing

 

Stuck in Park?

As a follow up to a highly successful series where the ymarketing team predicted winners on American Idol, we're now turning our attention to what could be called "Doom In Detroit".

This is the first in a series where we will look at what Search and Social Media data can tell us about the relative chance each Auto Manufacturer, and its brand lines, stand of surviving the current economy.

Background

The most popular post in the Idol Prediction Project series was when we looked at purchase intent. In that blog post we examined how search engine referrals leading to iTunes had a high correlation with each contestant's popularity. Week after week our data showed us the favorites, and identified those that were likely to be leaving early. Five weeks before the Final 3 Idol contestants were announced, our data correctly predicted it would be Adam Lambert, Kris Allen and Danny Gokey. We utilized Search and Social Media popularity as a proxy for the popular vote that the TV show conducted each week, with great success.

Applying Learning to Detroit

When it comes to understanding the current automotive industry landscape and predicting its future shape--and with it each Auto Makers chance at survival--we believe the same logic holds. Although; this American Idle Prediction Project on Automotive OEMs will certainly present its challenges.  For example: An inquiry into the volume of searches for "General Motors" these days yields a wealth of information, but nearly all of it is related to GM's government bailout, it's impending dealership closures, negotiations with the UAW and the like. Interesting, but not very helpful for predicting popularity and sales. But could an examination of all queries on Google for the search term "GM Dealership Chicago" yield the kind of results we're interested in; purchase intent?

Week One: Car Buyers Take Action After Researching Online

We took a look at one prominent car buying research site that served 6.3 million unique visitors last month, Edmunds.com, which ranks in the top 200 of all sites in the U.S. After visiting Edmunds.com, prospective buyers and tire-kickers alike venture off to well over 5,200 different sites (as measured by our data sources). These post-site visits are called "referral traffic" in search engine speak.

A significant portion of these post-site visits from Edmunds.com end up at the Auto Makers' own sites (fordvehicles.com and chevrolet.com), and many more end up at individual dealership sites (siouxcityford.com and hamiltonchevrolet.com as examples).

We wanted to see WHICH American Auto Makers are benefitting the most from this Referral Traffic and, arguably as important if not more important, which ones are growing month to month. Here's what we found over the last two months:

Week 1 Results

Ford is clearly in the lead with buyers who do their research on Edmunds.com. They have 55 different sites in the top 5,000 and all but a half dozen are dealerships. Their most prominent site, fordvehicles.com, ranked #19 overall and grew more than 4% last month alone. Fordvehicles.com also has a 10% edge over their largest competitor, GM's top site. Since Ford is a top tier and consistent advertiser on American Idol, it does beg the question: Is Idol responsible for helping Ford get out of Idle?

GM's top site, Chevrolet.com, ranks #22 and is in 2^nd place. The site's traffic from Edmunds.com referrals actually grew at a faster rate than Ford's at 19.2%; so we look for a showdown in the coming months for the top Auto OEM slot. GM has 40 sites in the top 5,000, and 30 of them appear to be dealerships. It could be argued that GM overall gets more traffic from Edmunds.com. If you add up all the available data for the top 600 sites GM actually has an 8% edge in total referral traffic. But none of those top 600 sites are a dealership, so it bears further research and analysis before we can draw a conclusion.

Chrysler is hurting. If you read the news, you know that. This blog will certainly pay attention to the news cycle and see how it impacts purchase intent. But for now, we can quantify that Chrysler's top site, dodge.com, ranked #25 and is in 3^rd place. The problem: the site saw its Edmunds.com referral traffic drop more than 9% last month. Chrysler has 36 sites in the top 5,000.

Encouraging signs: Chrysler appears to have the top two dealership sites (dodgedealer.com ranking #630 and windwarddodgechryslerjeep.com coming in at #649) and their #2 web property, chrysler.com, ranked #39 and grew at a rate of more than 50% last month.

What do you think?

What do you think of the premise of this blog series? Can purchase intent be measured by proxy using search and social media data? In coming blogs we will examine other data sources and yes, take a look at the global automotive industry as well. If you'd like to have input into the next installment, please share your ideas and opinions here.

For more information visit ymarketing.com, follow @ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707

Search & Social Media Data Split on Challenger to Idol favorite Adam Lambert | ymarketing

 

If you've followed the Idol Prediction Project and our data download you already know we've been saying Adam Lambert, Danny Gokey and Kris Allen (your Final 3) were the strongest contestants based on the data. We showed weakness in Matt Giraud's search and social media numbers the week before he was cut; and last week this blog showed that Allison had the lowest level of Global Appeal, just prior to her exit.

This week it's a lot tougher to predict what's going to happen. Reason: Beyond Adam, the verdict is split.

 

Who's #2? The case for Kris

Digg, Google Blog Search and iTunes all point to Kris Allen as the clear challenger to Adam in the finals. When measuring all Diggs (stories, article and blogs deemed worthy of sharing by Digg's 36MM+ users) since April, Kris Allen has a commanding lead...for #2 (94 diggs for Kris vs. 76 diggs for Danny). But both trail Adam's 421 diggs over the same period of time.

A search of blogs mentioning "Kris Allen" turns up nearly 39,300 since April 1 (12,400 since May 1), while "Danny Gokey" tallies 27,600 since April 1 (and 11,600 since May 1). Adam fans: Yes, he's clearly #1 with 53,600 mentions since April 1 (19,200 since May 1). It's interesting to note, though, that Kris mentions on blogs in the month of March actually outnumbered those mentioning Adam.

iTunes is more tricky to gauge. But with the help of compete.com we were able to measure search referrals that resulted in traffic to iTunes.com; and received a welcome assist in the form of a story that MJ broke on MJs Big Blog. MJ's blog clearly shows Kris as the front-runner for the #2 slot*, as measured by the mysteriously appearing/disappearing iTunes popularity bars. (*Behind Adam, who is seemingly miles ahead, each and every week).

Who's #2? The case for Danny

Google Search Traffic points to Danny starting to open up a narrow lead for #2 as of Wednesday, April 6^th, from a virtual dead-heat with Kris leading up to Tuesday night. (Adam is #1...by a mile.)

Facebook wall posts give the edge to Danny over Kris by the slightest of margins leading up to Tuesday night and into Wednesday April 6^th. (Adam is #1... by a factor of 2-3X.)

Twitter data points to Danny having about a 40% edge this month to date with over 2,900 tweets vs. Kris with just 2,100 tweets. (Adam has over 8,800.)

YouTube site referrals (search queries on search engines that lead to a YouTube visit) have Adam out front with the #16 and #45 overall search queries and 137 distinct terms (words or phrases) leading to videos of Adam. Danny is #2 here with #976 query and 15 overall search terms, and Kris is a distant #3 with the #3,535 query and only 8 overall search terms.

And one final thought: Take a look at the only search terms related to Idol contestants that Google Insights deems a "breakout" for this past week (breakout seems to be defined as a search that's growing at a rate of over 700%):

Who will end up in the finals? Who will win? The latter just maybe entirely dependent on the former, as there may be a swing vote factor to consider. If as the data shows, Adam gets through, the challenger may have a chance to take him down IF the swing votes follow Danny or Kris. However, if Adam gets a large portion of Kris or Danny's swing votes, he may become unbeatable. We'll attempt to predict the swing vote factor using destination referrals prior to the finals.

What do you think? What is the most compelling data source from this week's blog? We'd love to hear from you.

For more information visit ymarketing.com, follow @ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707

Can Google search data predict Idols with true Global Appeal? | ymarketing

 

If you've followed the Idol Prediction Project you already knew that Matt Giraud's following (as interpreted from Search and Social Media data) was limited at best. So his Wednesday April 29th departure didn't come as a big surprise, given who he was up against. But now things get interesting.

A post on April 17th "Kris Allen Twitter Momentum" pointed to an uprising by Kris Allen, but last week's post showed continuing strength by Adam Lambert (who came in 3rd and 4th place respectively Wednesday night).

For this week we're taking a look at the question of whether any of the remaining Idols have what could be called truly Global Appeal? WHERE does a contestant's fan base appear to be coming from, what's the size, and is it localized or widespread?

To help us decipher the answer to these important questions we've turned back to search engine data, courtesy of Google, and supplemented this week's findings with data from Facebook and Twitter.

Top Findings:
1. Adam Lambert is a global phenomenon. He is more popular in the Philippines and Singapore than in the U.S.

2. Adam's U.S. support is by far the broadest, with pockets of strength ranging across the U.S., coast to coast.

3. Kris Allen enjoys similar popularity in the Philippines.

4. Kris Allen's U.S. support has an epicenter: Little Rock, Arkansas.
5. Danny Gokey's global popularity is more confined to North America, and his domestic reach is headquartered in NY.

6. Allison Iraheta's global reach is similar to Danny's, as is her U.S. popularity (NY state).

7. Search terms "adam idol" and "adam lambert idol" in some cases outnumber searches for "american idol" and outnumber all other contestants combined.
8. The hottest growing idol-related searches last week (Google calls them "breakout") were "American idol disco", "adam lambert disco" and "kris allen disco" - all growing at a rate of 500% or better.
9. Adam Lambert and Kris Allen continue to top Facebook wall posts, as measured on Wednesday April 29th in the morning.

Are you interested in seeing some more of the research facts for yourself? We've made 18 pages of maps, data and trend research available in one PDF, available free for download.

What do you think? Which Idols have global appeal and global potential? Why are Allison and Danny getting so many votes in proportion to the searches being conducted for #3 and #4 finishers Kris and Adam?

For more information visit ymarketing.com, follow @ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707

Past American Idol Winner “Sparks” Kris Allen’s Twitter Momentum | ymarketing.com

 

Idol Prediction Project Post #2 - In our continuing efforts to track and predict the Season 8 American Idol winner using search and social media data, we noticed early signs of a departure from last week's All-Adam blowout. If you follow Idol fan sites like USA Today's Idol Meter you noticed that Kris Allen shot into second place this week after being in sixth the week prior. How? While this week's early search and social web data points pointed in many different directions this week, they provide insight into this surge from Kris:

TWITTER: The twittosphere was lit up Wednesday 4/15 with KRIS ALLEN being tweeted 10-to-1 over Adam for a period of time, but it quickly vanished and by Friday 4/17 Adam had resumed his commanding lead. Kris' tweets were apparently "sparked" by this tweet from Season 6 winner Jordin Sparks, "Kris' performance was awesome tonight"). Adam has a 2-1 edge in the number of tweets vs. Danny and Kris, with Lil, Matt, Allison and Anoop trailing in that order.

Tweet Volume 4/15/09 -Did Jordin Sparks comments ignite the Kris tweets?

 

Tweet Volume 4/17/09 - By the end of the week Adam's popularity righted the twitter ship.

FACEBOOK: Adam maintains a commanding lead, but Lil Rounds is making steady gains the last two weeks. The following chart leverages data from Facebook Lexicon. Setting the index to 1.0 for Danny Gokey's wall post volume from Wednesday, April 1, 2009, Adam has been running 4.9X that volume for two weeks.

 

DIGG: By far the most diggs are going to a contestant not even on American Idol, Susan Boyle, who appeared on Britain's Got Talent 2009 and completely shocked Simon Cowell (yes, he's a judge over there as well.) She has 337 diggs in the last 24 hours, compared to 7 for "The Hairstyles of Adam Lambert", and two each for "Saving Matt Giraud", Danny Gokey's "Endless Love" and Adam's "Born to be Wild".

SEARCH: Because of Kris Allen's surge on Twitter we dove into discovering where Kris's fans are going online after searching on his name, and came up with the following results. YouTube leads all destinations with 7.5% of traffic, followed by metacafe at 5.1% and Wikipedia at 4.6%:

Scary: In the "shock and disbelief" category, this just in from digg: Only 1 out of 3 of Americans can name the 3 Branches of Government, but 3 out of 4 can name a judge on American Idol.

For more information visit ymarketing.com, follow @ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707