Google Debuts +Post Ads: Lets Brands Turn Google+ Content Into Ads On GDN

Google has introduced its first monetization effort for its social networking platform, Google+. Rather than running ads directly within the platform, Google has announced a new ad unit called +Post ads, which allow brands to turn their Google+ content into expandable display ads. Those ads can then run across the Google Display Network.

Brands can re-purpose pictures, videos, Hangouts and turn them into display ads within the Google+ interface. The ads are distributed on the Google Display Network, which claims over 2 million web sites

Below is an example of a +Post ad from Toyota, an early test partner. The +Post ads can display in GDN sites on mobile devices as well.

Users can click the ad to expand it and see the full set of user comments. According to Google, social annotations help increase click through rates.  In addition to commenting, users can also share the content or join a live hangout.

Toyota USA, RITZ crackers and Cadbury UK are among the launch brands running +Post ads. Google plans to open the beta to more advertisers after collecting feedback from participating brands and users.

Prioritizing SEO Strategies In 2014: Where To Focus

Although there may not be a one-size-fits-all SEO strategy — due to the fact that ideal strategies will vary greatly between industries, company capabilities and business models — one thing remains true for everyone regardless of the size of the search team: ruthless prioritization of SEO efforts remains a critical component of SEO planning tasks.

Still, prioritizing SEO efforts often presents itself as a common challenge, especially for those that lack direct experience managing both SEO and analytics regularly enough to gauge the impact of potential SEO changes.

Proficiency in SEO prioritization depends on one’s ability to correctly assess the impact of changes within an increasingly ambiguous data model, so it requires not only a deep understanding of technical SEO and SEO best practices but also solid statistical analysis capabilities to boot.

In fact, it has been estimated that although nearly 80 percent of employees collect data or use data for decision-making, only 38 percent have the skills and judgment to use data successfully.

Expert proficiency assessing the priority of SEO tasks also requires being more of what I like to call a “right-brain analyst,” blending creativity with knowledge of SEO and a firm grasp of what drives your business in order to build out a comprehensive list of SEO opportunities. If your SEO team (or agency supporting your SEO efforts) does not understand your audience and business model, then definitely start there.

There are a number of areas where you can focus SEO efforts and literally hundreds of tactics that can be deployed. So how will you chose where to prioritize your energy to maximize your results? If you already have a large percentage of your overall website traffic and/or conversions coming from SEO, then you will also need to consider how to incorporateSEO defensive strategies as a top priority within your overall SEO plan.

In addition to SEO defense, here are a few areas that may be top priorities for your SEO program in 2014.

Mobile SEO Strategies Are Top Priority In 2014

Experts have been going on about the increasing importance of mobile marketing ad-nauseum over the last few years, and the data certainly suggest that those heralding the importance of Mobile SEO have been right all along.

Research conducted with Nielsen shows that 48% of mobile consumers start their purchase journey with paid and organic search results. And according to BI Intelligence, to date, approximately 60% of all online devices are now smartphones or tablets.

Mobile usage continues to rise. In fact, data from Emarketer suggests that in 2013, mobile device usage was the only media device type that showed year-over-year increases in consumer usage. If you don’t already have a mobile optimized site or mobile strategies in place then check out this excellent resource.

Prioritizing Social Media & SEO

According to eMarketer, by 2017, internet users that use a social network will reach 2.55 billion people. That’s staggering considering that the US census bureau estimates the world population to be just over 7 billion. Globally, 1 in 4 people use a social media network, and nearly 88% of marketers will use social media marketing this year.

Social media adds value in many areas beyond search that include research and development, customer support, demand generation, branding, HR and sales. With all of the value-add opportunities that social media presents and the plethora of technology and data available, it can be easy for marketers to lose focus, and it can be challenging to keep SEO and social media aligned effectively.

Thus, social media also presents its own unique prioritization challenges. The companies that will get the most value out of their social media efforts will be those that are able to overcome the challenge of effectively scaling social media across the organization with a clear understanding of the key areas of value that social media brings.

Prioritizing SEO & Paid Search Integration

It never ceases to fascinate me that, in general, although organic marketing drives 90% of traffic and paid efforts drive less than 10%, no matter where you go, organic marketing remains heavily under-invested compared with paid marketing activities.

SEO has the power to bring massive efficiencies to your overall marketing program. However, in a do-more-with-less world, in order to build more “free” traffic, you need people to scale. Not to mention these people need to be able to effectively leverage the amazing data and tools available to us today.

Hiring SEO talent with technical and analytical backgrounds can be a challenge, but when you have the right folks in place, some of the biggest search marketing wins you can achieve will be realized by combining your paid search data with your SEO data to improve your results. If you are not looking at paid and SEO data side by side, definitely start there.

Prioritizing Personalization & Audience Segmentation

Understanding your audience is critical to the success of your marketing efforts, and search marketing is no different. At Adobe, we use our own tools to help us test and customize our messaging so that it is most relevant and engaging to our audience with special consideration to where they are in the customer life cycle.

Beyond audience segmentation based on the phases of the customer life cycle, you may even consider another method of segmenting your audience into other groups, often referred to as cohorts. By taking this next step, you can identify what types of products or website content appeals most toward specific audience members. You can also craft messaging that resonates most with different types of visitors by testing psychology-based behavioral targeting to improve your results.

Whatever approach or combination of methods you employ toward crafting your messaging and behavioral targeting, testing the impact across multiple marketing vehicles such as paid search and SEO continues the yield the best results.

Scaling SEO

How are you scaling your SEO efforts in 2014? If you do not have an in-house search team, then perhaps 2014 is the year to make bringing SEO in-house a priority. If you already have SEO in-house, then consider the many opportunities to be found by aligning the teamappropriately with the right cross-functional colleagues within your own organization to help you scale your SEO efforts.

I was fortunate to be one of the first in-house SEO team members when Adobe decided to bring all of search marketing in-house, almost three years ago. I’ve seen firsthand that the benefits of an in-house SEO team include improved ROI and cost savings. Additional intangible benefits include sales support, product support, regional support, tighter stakeholder support and improved speed to market.

Additional considerations to help scale your SEO efforts in 2014 include investment in SEO tools and technology while finalizing your SEO budget. If at all possible, I always advocate making room in your budgets for SEO training for key employees that will impact your SEO results which includes non-SEO folk like engineers and interaction designers.

There are many other SEO tactics and strategies to consider for 2014, but what are your top priorities this year for SEO? Let’s continue this conversation in the comments — I’d love to hear where you are focusing your efforts in 2014. And I’ll continue to share top strategies and SEO tactics on my Twitter stream @warrenleemedia as I come across them, as well.

How Google Plus Profiles & Pages Gain Search Authority

At SMX East this past October, I gave a presentation titled, “Putting the SEO Power of Google+ to Work.” The centerpiece of that presentation was a first peek at a study I’d conducted that seemed to confirm my hypothesis that Google+ profiles and pages gain authority for ranking in Google Search (and elsewhere in Google, as you’ll see below) in much the same way regular Web pages do.

In this article, I’m going to expand upon that presentation and lay out the full case.

Profile Ranking Mysteries: A Personal Case Study

I’ve been active on Google+ since its third day. Thanks to relationships I’d already established through Google Buzz and other social networks, I quickly built a network with many influential Google+ users. By about eight months in, I had a respectable 10,000 followers, my highest follower count ever for a social network, but hardly a Google+ superstar.

But around then, I began noticing a strange power for my profile. If I reshared a Google+ post by a highly-followed G+ user on my own profile, and then a day or two later checked Google Search (logged out of Google, cache and history cleared), time and again I found that my reshare of the original post would be the highest ranking Google+ post for the title of the original post. In other words, I was often out-ranking users with many times the number of followers I had for their own posts in search.

Here’s an example from March 2012 that will help illustrate the phenomenon.

On March 5, I reshared on Google+ a post by popular social media speaker and author Mari Smith:

Notice that when you reshare someone else’s post on Google+, the entire text of the original post is embedded in the reshare and becomes part of the reshare. Also take note of the keyword phrase in the original post.

Below is a screen capture of the actual, logged-out-of-Google top search results for [fastest growing Facebook pages] just one day after my reshare of Mari Smith’s post:

Note that my Google+ post, not Mari Smith’s, was the top ranking Google+ post (indeed, the top ranking non-news post, period) for [fastest growing Facebook pages] at that time, even though the original post was by Mari Smith. As you can see, Google even grabbed the indexed title tag text from the first line of Mari’s post, not mine.

But here’s the more startling fact: At the time, Mari Smith had 60,000 Google+ followers, six times as many as me.

This was repeated again and again, where I could very often outrank people who had far more followers than I, for their own posts, when I reshared them. At that time, most people assumed that the more followers you had or the more +1′s your posts got, the higher you would rank in search. But I was able to show that neither was necessarily the case.

This still continues to this day. I’m still able (not always, but more often than not) to outrank many highly-circled Google+ users in Google search with my reshares of their original posts — even if the original post got a lot more +1s than mine did.

So what actually did (and still does) cause some profiles to rank higher than others in Google search? If not follower count or +1 count, what was the magic factor?

Discovery: Profile & Page PageRank Authority

In the early days of Google+, a number of SEO-savvy users noticed that their profiles showed Google PageRank in toolbar PageRank tools. But then one day, toolbar PageRank stopped showing in those tools. Most assumed that Google had changed its mind about assigning PageRank to Google+ profiles.

That was, until alert SEO Joshua Berg discovered it was there all along. Working off asuggestion by Dan Petrovic that it was a change in URL structure by Google+ that caused most PageRank checking tools to show zero, Joshua revealed one tool, prchecker.net, that could properly parse the URLs and show that Google+ profiles did indeed still have Google PageRank. (Tip: The new Google+ custom URLs will not work in that tool. You must right-click on a user’s name anywhere on G+, and copy and use that URL.)

Finally, I had a possible explanation for my super-ranking abilities. I began to test, and sure enough, in case after case, if the person whose post I reshared had a lower, or at most equal, PageRank compared to me, I could outrank them in search for the same post keyword. There were always anomalies — but not so many as couldn’t be explained by either the imprecision of toolbar PageRank, or the fact that undoubtedly other factors come into play in post ranking that a 0-10 PageRank scale can’t show.

By the way, we soon discovered that in addition to profiles, Google+ pages and communities also have their own PageRank.

But questions remained: Where does this PageRank come from? How does a Google+ profile or page earn PageRank (and more importantly, the search authority it represents)?

Sources Of Google+ PageRank

Below are the internal and external sources of Google+ PageRank, followed by an initial experiment and then a more extensive study on Google+ PageRank External Links.

Internal Sources

Since, at least on its surface, Google+ is a social network, it stands to reason that a primary source from which Google would assess profile authority would be connections within the network itself.

We know that Google uses links from regular pages on the Web as a primary means of assessing the relative authority of the pages to which they point. Google+ profiles and pages interlink with each other as well, so it makes sense that Google would use a similar strategy for Google+.

So, it’s likely that mentions, reshares, and perhaps other engagement from other users help build the PageRank authority of a profile. When you +mention someone on Google+ (type a + and their name), it creates a followed link to that person’s profile.

If the users mentioning you, resharing your posts, or otherwise engaging with you have high-authority profiles, then most likely they pass on more authority to your profile. Therefore, the more Google+ power users you network with, the higher your profile’s PageRank will probably climb.

External Sources

In addition to internal authority flow within Google+, if Google has assigned PageRank to G+ profiles, pages, and communities, then it also seems likely that links from Web pages external to Google+ would also help build the authority of those G+ entities.

In the illustration above, a blogger who interviewed me linked to my Google+ profile in her blog post. That followed link should send some PageRank authority from her site to my profile.

An Initial Experiment

When I first noticed that some Google+ Communities were ranking in search for their own names, I decided to launch an experiment. We got articles written about two up-and-coming Google+ communities on several high-authority blogs, with anchor text links with each community’s name linking to the communities. Within a few days, we saw the Fitness & Nutrition community move from page 8 (logged-out search) to page 1 for [fitness and nutrition], and the Google Authorship and Author Rank community move from page 4 to #1 on page 1 for [authorship and author rank].

The fitness community has since dropped down (although it remains #1 for [fitness and nutrition community]), while the Authorship community retains its #1 ranking at the time of this publication. I attribute the staying power of the latter community to the fact that it now has 320 external links from 41 domains pointing at it.

Those experiences made me want to test further to try to confirm my hypothesis that external links help determine the PageRank authority of Google+ profiles, pages, and communities. So I launched a new, more extensive study.

Google+ PageRank External Link Study

I decided to examine a range of profiles and pages at all levels of PageRank to see if there were any correlation between the strength of their external link profiles and their PageRank. I am heavily indebted to Paul Shapiro, who volunteered to collect the necessary data.

Some necessary background before we get to the results:

• Toolbar PageRank has not been updated since February of 2013.
• Our profile backlink data were collected in June 2013.
• We are assuming that PageRank of the study set of profiles would not have changed significantly enough from February to June to throw off the results.
• For backlink data, we used MajesticSEO, one of the few backlink tools that tracks Google+ profiles and pages.
• We eliminated profiles or pages that had few or no backlinks, since those profiles would have earned their PageRank entirely from internal Google+ links, and we were testing for external link influence.

The distribution of our sample group of profiles and pages is probably a fair approximation of the average PageRank distribution across all active Google+ accounts. When looking at the PR of profiles, we find that most which have been active for a while fall into the 2 to 4 range, and very few profiles have a PR of 6 or higher. We have found only one (Google’s own page) that has an 8, and none higher than that.

Here is the distribution of our sample group:

PageRank Vs. Citation Flow

We first extracted the MajesticSEO Citation Flow for each of the sample profiles. Citation Flow is defined by MajesticSEO as “a number of predicting how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it.” The chart below plots the average Citation Flow of our sample group over against their PageRank scores. Citation Flow rank is on the left, and PageRank is at the bottom:

As you can see, citation flow seems to graph as we would expect if profile/page PageRank is indeed influenced by external links. The more sites linking to a profile, the higher its PageRank.

What about Trust Flow? MajesticSEO Trust Flow is “a number predicting how trustworthy a page is based on how trustworthy sites tend to link to trustworthy neighbors.” In other words, this metric attempts to gauge the value of the links pointing toward (in this case) a profile. A higher Trust Flow number indicates that the links pointing to the profile are mostly of the sort that a search engine would be more inclined to trust, and thus give more weight.

Here is how Trust Flow compared to PageRank in our sample group:

The curve is a bit bumpier, but still overall conforms to the expectations of our hypothesis. In general, the higher the trust level of the backlinks to a profile, the higher its PageRank.

Here are the two metrics, Citation Flow and Trust Flow, combined for comparison:

The curves seem to confirm our hypothesis: the strength of external backlinks to a Google+ profile or page has an effect on the profile’s or page’s PageRank, and thus, on its ability to rank for its content, both within Google+ and in Google Search.

Profile PageRank & Google Authorship

It occurred to me that if my hypothesis about external backlinks was correct, then using Google Authorship should also have an effect on profile PageRank. Why? Because establishing Authorship for a piece of content, in most cases, involves placing a link from that content back to the author’s Google+ profile. It would seem to follow then, that profile owners who regularly create content on a diversity of sites using Google Authorship ought to have, on average, higher PageRank authority than those who do not.

To test this, I selected a sample of 60 active profiles, 30 that actively use Authorship, posting regularly on a variety of sites, and 30 that don’t (as far as I can tell). Other than that criteria, the profiles were selected randomly, without looking at their PageRank in advance. The graph below shows the results for both median and average PageRank for both sets of profiles:

While I would hesitate to call this study conclusive, at least for this test sample, on the average, profiles that use Google Authorship have about a full level of PageRank higher than those that do not. Once again, this is what we would expect to see if external links have an effect on the authority of Google+ profiles.

Final Thoughts

When Google set out to build Google+, the social network that they planned to make the “social layer” tying together all things Google, it’s not surprising that they baked into it some of their existing technology and expertise.

Their intention was that over time, Google+ pages and profiles would play an important role in helping to determine what should have more importance in various Google properties, and none are more important than Search. So Google gave profiles and pages (and now communities) the ability to have authority rankings in ways very similar to how Google evaluates “regular” sites and Web pages.

This means that Google+ profiles and pages build authority with Google by means not intuitive to most social media experts and analysts (which is why I believe so many of them have totally missed this).

What counts most is not necessarily how many followers or low-level social signals (e.g., +1′s) one’s profile has. Rather, Google takes a much more sophisticated and nuanced look at the links and relationships between various entities and a profile.

As I have demonstrated here, those entities can be both internal to Google+ (strong relational linkages from other profiles and/or pages) and external (strong backlink profiles from regular websites).

Increasing Visibility & Influence In Google Search

That means that anyone who wants to make use of Google+ as part of an overall strategy of increasing visibility and influence in Google Search should be actively pursuing all of the following tactics:

1. Build a strong network within Google+. You should seek to cultivate not just a large number of followers, but more importantly, active relationships and partnerships with influential Google+ users. Their citations to your profile have a powerful effect on its authority to Google.
2. Cultivate quality links from trusted websites. Create the kind of presence on Google+ that site owners want to recommend and link to. When being interviewed or referenced by a site, ask if they would link to your Google+ profile or page for identity purposes.
3. Use Google Authorship for your content across the Web. Although this tip applies only to personal profiles, since Google Authorship involves a legitimate, Google-approved link to our profile, the more quality content you produce on trusted sites, the more authority given to your profile.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Starbucks & The Economist Admit To Using Google+ For SEO More Than Social

 Last Friday, a New York Times report on Google+spotlighted Starbucks and The Economist as two brands currently using Google+ to impact search efforts.

Alex Wheeler, Starbuck’s vice president of global digital marketing, told The New York Times, “When we think about posting on Google+, we think about how does it relate to our search efforts.”

According to the The New York Times report, Starbucks has only three million Google+ followers compared to its Facebook page’s 36 million Likes. The New York Timessays Starbucks, “Updates its Google+ page for the sake of good search placement, and takes advice from Google representatives on how to optimize Google+ content for the search engine.”

While The Economist’s senior director of audience Chandra Magee did say journalists atThe Economist take advantage of Google+ features like Hangouts, she also commented on how Google+ improves the brand’s SEO efforts.

“There is potential there [on Google+] to help us get in front of new audiences,” Magee told the New York Times, “But it also helps with our SEO strategy because our posts on Google+ actually show up in our search engine results.”

The New York Times reports Google offers brands incentives to sign up on its social media network, giving companies with Google+ profiles, “Prime placement on the right-hand side of the search results, with photos and promotional posts.”

The New York Times says nearly half of 540 million monthly active users on Google+ do not visit the social network. When asked about Google+ integrations and the push-back Google received after it began requiring YouTube comments be made via Google+, Horowitz said, “We are attuned both to what people say and to what people do.”

The 3 campaign system for your Facebook funnel, how it operates

Don’t know how to organize your ads into proper campaigns or find yourself boosting posts sporadically with uneven results?

Or wanting to generate leads and sales, but not getting conversions on Facebook?

You need to implement the 3 campaign system, layered into Audience, Engagement, and Conversion.

Word of mouth, whether on Facebook or the real world, is much like the courtship process. Prospective customers hear about you from your existing customers, they learn about your business over time in little tidbits, and eventually buy, when the time is right.

To use the dating analogy, you move from first encounter to first date to first kiss, until you have your conversion event, your wedding day.

Just like in marketing automation or the AIDA funnel (or take your pick among other engagement models), you need to move your customers down progressively increasing level of relationships.

And you can do this nurturing automatically, if you set up these 3 campaigns in exactly the method we outline. Each campaign feeds one another, so that they’re tied together.

Audience

The chicken and egg of Facebook marketing is that if you don’t have a loyal fan base of existing customers, there is no word of mouth to amplify. You need social proof to let prospective customers see what your existing customers are doing.

It’s not about “buying” fans, since we’re talking about real customers who love you, but might not be on Facebook yet. So let them know by importing your email list or phone list into Facebook as a custom audience, asking them to become a fan.

You run a page like sponsored story with a custom audience, page like regular ad targeting the custom audience, and page like regular ad targeting people who you think are likely to be fans. If you’re pro, run a page post ad with media workplace targets.

Engagement

This is where you’re putting in the bulk of your efforts. The longer your sales cycle (such as in B2B or high dollar transactions), the more content you need to load here. Your primary goal is to make sure the audience you built in the first campaign is seeing your messages in their newsfeed.

Facebook says that fans see only 16% of page status updates, though the number is often much lower, due to increased competition. So you do have to pay to get proper reach.

You’ll use a combination of onion targeting to get your audience size correct.

You run a page post ad, choosing the most recent post checkbox, targeting your fans. Duplicate this ad, removing the fan targeting and select other combinations or literal, lateral, and competitive targets. Duplicate this ad again and select just your custom audience or multiple custom audiences. If you’re pro, you’ll run page post like stories to amplify to friends of users who are engaging with the page– “Alex commented on this post”. If you have a fan base over 10,000, then you can create variants of the above with FOF (friend of fan) filters, so you have an even tighter audience, too.

Conversion

Now that you have the first two campaigns running in concert- to drive initial awareness of your business and get on-going engagement.

It’s taboo to sell-sell-sell on Facebook, so we’re going to use a number of dark posts. You can get away with one promotional message out of every 4 posts, so long as your other 3 are engaging/interesting.

But we recommend dark posts here, since you may have different things to say to different segments of your audience base. You wouldn’t want to natively post 20 different things to Facebook, which would inundate fans with content not relevant to them. Rather, you’d set up dark posts (also called unpublished posts) to designate exactly who needs to see what post. But, you have to pay for it.

For your dark posts, run primarily page post link ads. Choose an interesting image. Include an offer or discount if you can. If your brand doesn’t support this, then you can send them to a guide or other meatier piece of content that requires registration.

For agencies and those interested in lead gen, you’d push your various landing pages, which can be within a Facebook tab or not.

These dark posts hit your fans and custom audiences, so you’re not hitting people not already interested in what you offer.

You should test combinations of newsfeed only as well as RHS (Right Hand Side) to see what converts better. If your site is not mobile-friendly, do desktop newsfeed only.

You run 3 dark posts to your fan base. Duplicate these ads to your custom audiences. Set FBX retargeting with different offers/messages using a 3rd party vendor such as Perfect Audience. Change out your dark post content every couple weeks, playing “winner stay on”, whatever is converting best or is your latest special.

There you have it, the 3 campaign layered strategy that will drive your users from awareness to interactions to conversions. Users move automatically through the campaign levels because their friend is a fan, they became a fan, they engaged with you, or they have given you an email/cookie.

Source : https://alexhoug.com/3-campaign-system-facebook-funnel-operates

The Smart Marketer Guide To Facebook's 15 Ad Types

Facebook once had 29 different ad units.

Then they trimmed it to just 15 ad units on September 10, 2013.

Here’s your guide on which ones to use in what situation, accompanying Facebook’s own explanations.

If you’re content to just use Facebook’s boost button, this guide is not for you.

But if you are ready to start getting serious about leveraging Facebook ads for your business, sit back and take some notes.

This post runs long, going into a lot of detail. Go ahead and bookmark it now so you can come back to it for reference.

Ready?

Some Simple Ground Rules

Unless you do Facebook advertising as a profession, don’t worry about the exact image sizes and text length. Just post all images as big as you can and with a 2:1 aspect ratio, for example, 1200 x 600 (length x width).

And keep your posts short, under 10 words, just like you were writing copy for a billboard on the freeway.

You’ll be spending most of your ad budget paying to make sure that your posts are showing up in the newsfeed. Thus, you’re amplifying the reach of organic content, as opposed to creating content specifically for ads.

If you try to run sponsored stories but don’t have a sufficient base, organic reach, and organic engagement, there’s nothing to amplify.

So for both of these types of content (what you say and what fans do) to work effectively, you have to employ a 3 campaign funnel strategy.

All the ad types that follow fit into this framework.

Most people get confused here.

While we are technically paying to send messages, they should not look like “ads”, self-promotional and non-social. Think of it like paying to enhance your

organic reach.

Page Post Ad

The page post ad is the workhorse of your campaign. We use this technique on all new ad accounts.

In particular, the page post photo ad is usually most effective at both engagement and conversion on a website, since now you can have photo clicks to to your site, as opposed to the gallery.

Page Like Ad

The second most common ad is the page like ad, where “Justin Lafferty likes [page_name]“. If you want to see a bunch of ads available to you, go to the adboard at facebook.com/ads/adboard.

Within it, you can click on “sponsored stories” to see examples of primarily page like ads. These ads convert better (fan to click ratio), because users can become a fan right from the ad unit without going to the page.

Having actions be possible within the ad unit is called an “in-line action”, and will be key to Facebook monetizing in 2014 and beyond.

Expect the ability to purchase specific items from an ad in an Amazon “one click” like way. We got a briefing at
Facebook headquarters on this back in late November.

Offers

Offer ads are for local businesses that have storefronts, where customers can physically redeem the offer. The online-only offer went away, but some on-line only businesses have jiggered this to still work for them.

App Ads

If you have an app you’ve built, you can run an app ad, but for 98% of us, we’re not in the business of selling games or driving mobile app installs.

Event Ads

Event ads are tough unless you have a strong email list and marketing power behind the event. Because you’re driving traffic for a singular event, once the event is over, you’re done. There is no on-going component, like you’d have for a page.

Domain Ads

Domain ads are powerful if you have enough traffic on your website such that people are sharing those links in their newsfeed. Probably not effective for small businesses, but it is a strong version of sponsored stories for major e-commerce and media players.

Sponsored Stories

A sponsored story is paying to ensure newsfeed coverage when a friend does something. You can choose what that something is, liking your page, checking in (my favorite for retailers), commenting on a post, and so forth.

Note that this is content that would have been eligible to show up in the newsfeed, but likely would not have without your paying for it. The newsfeed is so competitive that without a paid strategy in 2014, you’ll not likely get enough reach (exposure).

Alternatively, there are a class of actions called “consumptions” that are clicks that do not generate stories.
For example, photo views, link clicks, navigational clicks, and the notorious grab-bag called “other clicks”.

A story is an action that could potentially show to that user’s friends.

Bridging The Like Confusion Gap

People are most likely to get confused between a page like story and a page post like story.

The former is when people become a fan of your page, while the latter is when they like an particular post. Certainly, someone could be a fan of your page and also click “like” on one of your posts.

The confusion is around what clicking “like” means, as people aren’t sure if they’re liking the page or the post. Advertisers and end users are equally confused. That’s why we say “become a fan” when we’re talking about liking a page.

You’ll want to run your page like stories as part of your audience growth campaign and your page post like stories in your engagement campaign. Keep them separate, else you will be comparing apples and oranges.

Unless you are hard-core or a programmer, you can ignore the app shared, domain, and open graph stories.

Placements

There are 3 places that your ads can show, called placements.

Right Hand Side

The right column is often called RHS (Right Hand Side).

These are the 7 tiny ads that have low CTR (click through rate), but also cost less per impressions, proportionately. Generally, this placement is less effective at driving engagement within Facebook, but sometimes can outperform the newsfeed placements on website conversion campaigns.

Mobile & Desktop

The two newsfeed placements are mobile and desktop. Don’t run mobile placements unless you have a mobile-responsive site. In other words, if you squeeze your site down to a couple hundred pixels across in your web browser (to simulate looking at it on a phone), does it render okay?

Expect mobile to cost you $10-20 per thousand impressions (called CPM), while the desktop newsfeed is just under half that. One is not necessarily better than the other. Just know that the average CPC (cost per click) is often similar between all three placements.

In other words, the price you pay per click will be nearly the same, since the price per impression is balanced out by the click-through rate. Until a year ago, we had an arbitrage advantage by bidding on the mobile newsfeed placements, since the increase in price (double) was far less than the increase in CTR (5 times), leading to a cost per click of less than half.

If the above sounds like gibberish to you, just know that you should be bidding optimized CPM in nearly all cases. In other words, let Facebook do the work for you here.

Not all ads can run in all placements.

But for the majority of folks reading this article, who aren’t using specialized ad units, it won’t matter.

If you goal is reach, go for the RHS, since you can run the frequencies (views of an ad) much higher. We’ve seen some CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) brands run as high as 50. Not recommended, since you’ll burn out after 5-10, if not sooner.

If you want to show the highest engagement rate, run the mobile newsfeed, since the engagement rates can sometimes hit 30-40%. We’ve seen this with social brands in social verticals, but 5-6% is more common.

If you’re looking to drive more profitable traffic and leads, then placements won’t matter so much to you, you’ll just have to test what combinations work best for you.

Who really cares that much about the CTR or CPC so long as you’re doing it profitably, right?

But if you’re an agency, sometimes your client cares more about a particular metrics, like a lower CPM, more impressions, or a higher engagement rate.

In that case, use placements to be able to fluff the numbers and meet your objectives.

Page Post Text Ad

A page post ad that is just text does generate lower CPMs. This leads some people to mistakenly conclude that a page post text ad is a “better deal”. However, remember that a photo post takes up 3-4 times more real estate in the newsfeed.

So consider if trading your 5 dimes for 10 nickels is really such a bargain. Facebook has the size and effectiveness already priced in. Your opportunity for arbitrage is through smarter targeting and copy, not through bid optimization or placement tricks.

Page Post Photo Ad

The page post photo ad is our favorite.

Did you know that you can include multiple photos in the post?

We recommend sticking with one.

While you can have up to 500 characters for the text in the desktop placement, just keep it under 90 characters so you can run the ad across multiple placements or just replicating to isolate placement performance.

Page Post Video Ad

We used to prefer posting YouTube videos in our posts, since they were big and generated high engagement. Now that Facebook favors native video and has auto-play (no sound), you’ll have to experiment to find what works best for you.

Your cost per click should still be a lot less than YouTube TrueView in-stream ad units.

Page Post Link Ad

The page post link ad looks very much like a page post photo ad, except all clicks go to your website.

Instead of creating multiple offers, just duplicate this ad unit and try out many different photos and audience combos.

As a dark (unpublished post), clicks on images or the text area drive people to your website. So if you found that your earlier page post ads were driving a lot of photo views under optimized CPM, try this again.

You might try optimizing to a conversion event if you want the person to fill out a form or checkout in your cart. And if you have multiple stages in the funnel, try testing against the offsite pixel that is just before the actual checkout confirmation, since it gives Facebook more data to play with to find who will convert.

Offer Ad

You’ll get a lot of folks “claiming” your offer, which then drives sharing. But watch for breakage, or when people don’t actually redeem. Two years ago, our claim rate was only a few percent, largely because of the novelty factor.

Make sure your targeting is specific, else you risk negative ad feedback, especially with newsfeed placements.

If you’re really pro, segment your offers by custom audiences, so you have loyalty offers for existing customers and new customer offers for people not in your list (use your custom audience as an exclusion).

Event Ad

If you’re using event management software or marketing automation, you might try testing the event ad vs a page post link ad to see what drives registrations more effectively.

Page Like Ad

Back when getting lots of cheap fans was all the rage, we used this technique to fluff the numbers. For Carl’s Jr, we would merely say “Click LIKE if you like bacon”, which gave us an insane CTR and then a click-to-fan conversion rate north of 75%. But these were fans who were clicking like on the content (an in-line like), not actually engaging with the brand.

If you want fans, you might try the page post ad with the optimization set to driving more fans, plus running the page like sponsored story. When you have great content, the engagement ads will drive some fan growth, too. The advantage is that fans who engage with your content are higher quality than in-line likes.

The page like ad does allow you to convey a brand message, while a sponsored story does not. And if you’re clever, the CPF (Cost Per Fan) of the page like can beat the page like sponsored story, while still delivering decent quality fans that are on-message.

Mobile App Install Ad

We see mobile app installs at 30-40 cents per install regularly for consumer-focused brands in the US. B2B works surprisingly well, too, far cheaper than Linkedin or twitter card traffic.

We used to set up a ton of micro-targets, but now find that Facebook’s optimized cPM is so smart that you can target larger audiences and have their algorithm do the work of targeting and bidding for you.

App Ad

App ads are RHS only. So you have just 90 characters before they truncate. Sometimes truncation isn’t bad, since the reader can be curious what is next. But in one of our ads for “BlitzMetrics Analytics”, it cut off the last four letters of the second word, so be careful!

If you have an app, you’ll have to advertise to get traffic, since viral loops aren’t effective alone anymore. Expect consumer games to be 25-30 cents per install in the US if you’re doing well.

Domain Ad

We don’t recommend domain ads, except to test versus the page post link ads. Not to be confused with domain sponsored stories are effective.

Even though Facebook decided in mid-December 2013 not to follow through with the new newsfeed layout, we still believe the RHS is not as strong and that consumers still think that the newsfeed is organic, with the RHS being just ads.

Page Like Sponsored Story

The page like sponsored story automatically restricts connection targeting to friends-of-fans. So you can multiply combinations off this.

Make sure that if you have a fan acquisition campaign, you have an engagement campaign to nurture these new fans. The former campaign should feed the latter, as described here. Otherwise, your new fans die. And your engagement campaigns don’t feed your conversion campaigns.

Facebook gives you a newsfeed boost to new fans of your page.

The RHS version of the page like sponsored story, much smaller.

Page Post Like Sponsored Story

Page Post Comment Sponsored Story

Page Post Share Sponsored Story

Likes, shares, and comments carry different weights in the newsfeed algorithm. We’ve seen that shares are worth the most, generating approximately 13 times as many social impressions as likes.

However, why choose just one, go for them all. Our research shows that females, younger audiences, and Hispanics are more likely to click like, for example. With action spec, you can focus on one type of social engagement, but I like to think that we should allow people to choose by their own preferences and demographics.

Here are the rest of the sponsored story types.

If you have built an app, integrated open graph with your site, or are a major brand, they might apply to you.

In general, I’ll say that premium ads are the million dollar ticket for big brands that enjoy “TV-like” exposure, big ad units and takeovers. If you’re a performance advertiser, the cost per impression, cost per click, and cost per conversion of premium units won’t be as strong as the others we’ve mentioned here.

Source : http://socialfresh.com/facebook-ad-types/