This morning I listened to Jeremy Schoemaker’s interview with Tim Kendall. The interview provided a lot of great insight into the best practices for leveraging the Facebook advertising system which still remains in its infancy. Tim expressed their dedication to scaling the advertising platform but for the time being he emphasized how they are still in startup mode.

Jeremy highlighted how he has been extremely effective at advertising local businesses, dentists in particular. He gave an example of one dentist who was forced to pause their advertising campaign and was considering opening a new office because the advertising was so effective. Conversely, Jeremy highlighted the pain experienced through managing Facebook advertising campaigns and how this was ultimately an opportunity to make serious money (especially through arbitrage).

Jeremy stated that he is currently directing leads to landing pages and this has been working effectively after extensive testing. Tim Kendall highlighted that an alternative route to this is directing users to fan pages, something I agree wholeheartedly about and will be publishing more about in the near future. Tim gave an example of a local barbershop in San Francisco that spent $215 on advertising in the month of December and generated 6 new memberships which yielded $6,000.

Tim also briefly touched on how Facebook ads are optimized. He stated that the ads are chosen based on those that will yield the highest eCPM, similar to Google’s advertising model. Tim also mentioned that they may in the future let advertisers target users based on their status and within a given time horizon. For example, placing an ad for all users that had “hungry” in their status for the past hour.

While they currently don’t provide time horizon targeting, he mentioned that this is something that they are currently considering working on. I’ve included the podcast below so that you can hear the full interview.