Targeting Your Facebook Ads

Far and away the most popular post on this blog in recent weeks has been one written back in February, “Do Facebook Ads Work?” The answer was a strong “yes,” and research since then, including interesting findings on ad formats by Nielsen, continue to confirm that. A recent article in Bloomberg Business Week recounts the interesting story of the Nike “Write the Future” ad that was huge during the World Cup and goes on to talk about the importance of Facebook friends and the “like” function to Facebook advertisers.
















To demonstrate, I wrote a hypothetical ad on Facebook; that’s Step 1. Step 2 shows the main aspects of the targeting process. The advertiser can target by location (essential; no one needs to reach all 500 million Facebook fans!) and by demographics—age and gender only. So far, not different from traditional media advertising, and it works like Google AdWords as far as the setup is concerned.

Then comes the difference! On Facebook, the advertiser can target by “Likes & Interests.” This shows Facebook’s own description of a user profile. The implication seems to be that this is all data that the user has provided on the profile page. Not exactly. Every time the user “Likes” a friend’s post new data is created. What else? It’s not entirely clear exactly what/how other data provided by users like location data is collected and used. Prof. Eben Moglen of Columbia University Law
School says Facebook is “spying for free all the time.” You can read a summary of a recent speech in which he lays out the privacy concerns, but that still begs the question of exactly where the marketing data comes from.

The richness of the data is not in question, however. Nor is the usefulness of the Estimated Reach tool. Each time the potential advertiser adjusts any one of the targeting filters, the ER changes, so the exact effect of each descriptor is known. That data alone can tell you a lot about potential market size in a given region—no cost except expenditure of your time. Farther down on the targeting page, not captured in the graphic above, is the ability to target to your page (or groups) own members and, separately to their friends. Using the ER tool on your own page can give you fascinating insights into the composition of your fan base. Do you see a new market segment representing an opportunity you were not even aware of? Or do you see that you don’t have as many people from your target segment as you wish and need to run a campaign to get more friends.

All this creates a rich stew of research and advertising opportunities. You can access all this information from the Advertising text link at the bottom of your Facebook page, whether you are an individual user or have a business page.

The final piece of good news is that you don’t even have to buy an ad to experiment with the options. Why don’t you give it a spin???

Behavioral Redux

If anyone doesn’t believe that the Internet is still evolving with astonishing speed, try this. Just as I finished yesterday’s post on behavioral targeting, I noticed that a start-up in that space had received another round of venture funding. Lotame™ is another attempt at helping social networks monetize their business and marketers reach denizens of the networks. This ad was posted on the founder’s blog. It’s dated May 7, so there may be more than 28 million people 3 months later! According to Marketing Charts, MySpace had 75.2 million unique users in July and Facebook had 39 million. That’s a big pool of potential acquaintances for Lotame and customers for marketers! The question continues to be how to reach them in a manner they find acceptable.

Lotame founder Andy Monfried says that the tools developed for Web 1.0 don’t work in the UGC environment of Web 2.0. One reason is that websites no longer define content. That’s a simple but profound idea.

The proprietary technology the firm has developed is called Crowd Control™. Exactly how they do it is unclear—no surprise. The best hint is that the technology “allows us to aggregate behaviors unique to each page within user content.”
Here’s a link to their video page. There are a number of interesting snippets, but they describe the basic process as collecting, analyzing and leveraging data for marketing decisions. That’s what we’re all trying to do. The take-away from studying this site is the importance of behavioral analysis. In the social media space, it’s not about the site the user is on. It may not even be about the particular page. It could be the functionality on a particular page that provides the common thread that identifies a target market.

That describes analytics at a very micro level. Is that what’s necessary to connect with a Web 2.0 audience? And when we connect on issues that are relevant to them, will they pay attention?

Those are key marketer questions in the Web 2.0 world!

Next Step in Behavioral Targeting?

Marketers know that segmentation is key to targeting which, in turn, leads to increased marketing ROI. From the beginning of the Internet savvy marketers have seen the potential for improved targeting that comes from tracking customer activities on the web, as indicated in the chart from eMarketer (newsletter, June 19, 2008). Behavioral targeting is well established, although not without issues from the consumer perspective. Remember the controversy over Facebook’s Beacon advertising program?

Consumers are wary that their privacy is being invaded by ad targeting efforts. eMarketer’s July 29 newsletter quotes a study from Harris Interactive that shows 55% of respondents “very” or “somewhat comfortable” with the privacy and security policies of sites that allow targeted advertising. That leaves 45% who are “not very” or “not at all comfortable” with those same policies. That’s an interesting split! In the same newsletter they quote a TNS study in which a large majority of respondents describe themselves as knowledgeable about both privacy threats and tools to deal with them. With due respect to our customers, I absolutely don’t believe they are knowledgeable. I know how much trouble behavioral marketers have in trying to explain behavioral analysis and targeting to potential customers. I also know how unaware my own graduate marketing students are of the basics of behavioral targeting on the web. Consumers think they are aware, but it’s highly unlikely that they understand the intricacies. If they knew, would they be more or less concerned? My guess is more, not less.

That’s not going to stop the unrelenting advance of technology though. In this iMediaConnection video Jim Calhoun of PopularMedia describes what his firm is doing to add data from the social graph to targeting models. Direct marketers have long known that people gravitate to others like themselves and have used that kind of affinity in segmentation and targeting. The next step may well be mapping out the social graph and using those connections to better understand consumers. The first 2 minutes of the video talk about the behavioral marketing developments; the second half is a bit of background on the social graph. Watch either or both segments—it will either fascinate you or creep you out—depending on your personal perspective!
View the video here.

Then think about your customers, and how they’re likely to feel. Then consider the following quote from Fran Maier, executive director of TRUSTe, the privacy organization.

“Education once again appears to be the key to finding a constructive balance between behavioral targeting and consumer privacy, because no matter how much we assure anonymity, there is still significant discomfort with the idea of tracking . . .We have a solid indication that consumers want us to find a way to get them the advertising that is relevant to them. In order to do this, behavioral targeting is one of the most promising methods, but at the very least, it has to be made more transparent, provide choices, and deliver real value.”

While I agree with that statement, I still have a question. Is “education” best done by a single enterprise or would it be better received from an objective third party? Third parties like TRUSTe have a major role to play, but so far it’s not clear to me that they are reaching the great mass of Internet users with any impact. I think businesses should worry about that. They should also make a herculean effort to let their customers know what they are doing and to explain the value that targeted advertising does bring. They have to do that in a way that’s comprehensible and not too self serving. That’s a tall order, but it’s necessary to build and maintain consumer trust!