Want to target a single ad at both the United States and Iraq? While that may not be something you want to accomplish, it’s something you’ll soon be able to do. On Wednesday a revised version of my Facebook demographics tracking script started acting funny and after a little bit of poking around I realized that Facebook has revised their ad location field to let users manually enter countries rather than select them from a drop-down as previously was the case.
Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past few weeks, big affiliate advertisers on Facebook have reported a spike in fake clicks, but this is only part of where Facebook has faced challenges within its ad network over the past few months. The reason for the surge in fake clicks is a result of a number of things including the creation of Facebook ad scrapers that are being used to track advertisers’ ads on the site and what pages the ads are linking to.
Read the rest of this entry »

Want to make a lot of money overnight? Here’s how: set up a quiz application and throw on advertisements which promote IQ tests that you purchase through your phone and you’ll be headed in the right direction. That’s the current state of the Facebook platform since Facebook is not aggressively policing it. Yesterday I posted about the latest developer trick and a number of commenters came to the same conclusion: Facebook needs to enforce the developer terms.
Read the rest of this entry »

While Facebook applications are known for flashy ads that will use dirty tricks to get users to click on them, Facebook public profiles have been able to avoid having advertisements placed on them. According to AdAge article yesterday, public profiles are no longer virgin territory for sponsors. Us Weekly has successfully sold sponsorship to State Farm on their public profile.

So is the beginning of a greater trend? Read the rest of this entry »

This morning I was reading a Forbes article in which the author, Taylor Buley, does some flawed math to figure out the ridiculous number of ads Facebook would have to display to generate $100 million. Taylor makes a solid point, with extremely low click through rates Facebook needs to attract tons of impressions to generate a substantial profit. Thankfully Facebook has billions of monthly impressions and that number continues to grow.
Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight we had the opportunity to check out some of the applications that Facebook is actively testing advertisements on. We’ve also included a screenshot of some of those advertisements below. So far Facebook is advertising on three Zynga applications (Heroes vs Villains, Special Forces, and Word Twist), the We’re Related application by FamilyLink, and one other unnamed developer who’s ads are in beta.

Currently the advertisements are similar to the ones you’d see on the sidebar except that the layout is a bit more horizontal. The key value addition is of course that these ads will be targeted just like their existing ads. Many ad networks that I’ve spoken to have been exploring developing their own targeting systems but in many cases doing so appears to be pointless now that Facebook has entered the game.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is a guest post by Mike Volpe, VP of Inbound Marketing at HubSpot.
I have been advertising on Facebook for a while, and have done a number of other forms of online advertising over the years. Currently, the big advantage Facebook has is the cost per click rates are still very low so you can get traffic at a lower cost than Google AdWords or many other sources. I have found that if you target the people and ads appropriately, you can get Facebook traffic to convert at about 2/3 the rate of AdWords, which given the much lower (5-7 times lower) cost per click, means the leads are still cheaper.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday we reported on a Facebook screenshot that replaced the Advertising tab to read as the “Lying” tab. We initially thought the screen shot may have been a hoax because of the tab’s alignment, but later learned that the screen shot wasn’t altered. What we didn’t learn yesterday, however, is what Facebook had to say about it.

In the face of having a serious and ongoing issue with the public perception of its ad network, Facebook has revealed today that the word “Lying” appeared as a result of its language translation application, reports TechCrunch. This was, in fact, an English to English auto-translation that managed to allow the word lying to replace the advertising tab in certain regions.
Read the rest of this entry »

For the past few months Google has been filling ad inventory on Facebook applications and according to individuals on the team behind the ad sales, things have been going well. When Facebook launched their platform last year, a whole slew of new startups emerged around the social advertising space. Companies like SocialMedia, Cubics (later acquired by Adknowledge), AdParlor.com, Lookery, and others each fought for a piece of the social advertising pie. Small startups are rapidly finding that it’s not a good place to play though.
Read the rest of this entry »