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Today Facebook sent out a message to advertisers notifying them that there are two new features to target users with: language and target location radius. For example if you are searching for people in Washington, DC, you can now expand the distance beyond DC to a specific number of miles (10, 25, or 50). This is a huge upgrade for Facebook’s targeting.
Previously, in order to target based on language, you were forced to specify countries that you wanted to target. Frequently there are countries that have multiple languages and adding the language feature will help substantially. In regards to the new distance targeting, this means that advertisers can now specify metropolitan areas rather than just cities.
Previously if I targeted Washington, DC, I would use ads that included Arlington, Virginia, Bethesda, Maryland, and other local cities. I can imagine that these new features will be extremely useful for any advertiser looking to target Facebook’s more than 190 million users. One feature that I’m hoping Facebook launches soon is the ability to target by zipcode.
The timing of this is not surprising considering that Google announced today that advertisers can now target users based on interest. This move clearly reduced the value gap provided by Facebook advertising and other social networks like MySpace who offer targeting by interest. Facebook still has advertising advantages in that you can target based on an individual’s job position, age, location, and gender.
Have you taken advantage of Facebook’s advertising platform? What types of results are you seeing? Do you think Google’s new interests-based ad offering will detract from advertisers moving to Facebook?
Language Targeting
Radius Targeting
At last! People search the internet according their short or long term interests. Therefore all searches are just expression of these interests. Interests are the driving factor of search on the Internet.
Let’s discuss interests as driving force of new advertising in a group “Interests” http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=42398556709
Great news!… Any progress towards a more granular approach to targeted advertising is much appreciated.
Google will never have the personal data that facebook has, so while adwords looks like the run away winner - just give fb ads a little time and it will replace adwords as the “must” Internet ad buy.
im following the facebook ads program on my blog at adsonfacebook.wordpress.com and on Twitter at @facebookads - check them out.
I’ve used the FB advertising and the other wonderful element is that they allow you to target your audience by keywords. For instance I wanted to target Christians who read the Bible or do Bible Studies and listen to MercyMe. I saw a noticeable increase in my web traffic with FB and a noticeable difference when I paused the ad for a day. FB allows you to see the click through rate on each campaign. I ran three different campaigns of the same ad at different bids for clicks and was able to track by CTR which ad was the most efficient and profitable. Interestingly, it was not the one with the highest bid per click.
So, I am having a doubt about the language preference and the ability to help with granularity on advertising. I wanted to know if you guys would help me out. Facebook says that they are able to determine which user speaks the language, is it only by the manual preference that someone puts OR is it by reading their page and knowing the difference between english and spanish . Also the feature DOES not let you select AND so you can only advertise to two languages. Nevertheless, I need some help maybe you guys can give some input. I started a Chinese study abroad immersion program and want to focus to latam well it ends up i spend a thousand dollars or so on advertising in south america and the results were very poor. I got interest but the quality of the closing was poor because a lot of people asked for loans or financial aid (granted I know this is latam so I kinda knew what I was expecting). However, there are people in latam who can afford my programs and it ends up that anyone who speaks two languages or more probably has the money because they went to good schools etc, so do you guys suggest i market to spanish speakers or all speakers in latam but make my ad in english so that those that do read the add have to read english? OR which is something i started doing today was have a spanish add but put the english perference (this options drops the population SIGNIFICANTLY from 1mm to like 200k ot even 100k people but I don’t know if these are americans who are in that country who wouldn’t use my program anyway, anyways, your thoughts and analysis would be appreciated.
John Doe
Great news for the world of social media marketing. Thanks for doing a great job detailing all the new ad targeting feature. I wish Facebook had been so clear about this. Next, I would like to see Facebook add the ability to track conversions, as this is a top requested item from my clients.