Facebook Advertising Optimization Tool
Facebook just announced an important redesign of its interface that will start rolling out to all of us in the upcoming weeks. In this post I’m gonna focus on what’s gonna change for advertisers in the way Facebook Ads are displayed but, if you missed the news, let me first tell you what’s gonna change in the way you see Facebook every day.
Here’s how it will look:
And here’s the key changes you should be aware of, in our opinion:
Reducing the cost of the acquisition of new likes is the ultimate goal of every advertiser using Facebook Ads to improve his page’s number of friends. However this search for cheap Facebook likes is often pushed too far, and what may seem like a great achievement is, in fact, just a waste of money.
Yesterday I happened to see one of these cases where, what I would describe as a shady tactic, was used to gather a huge amount of likes on a Facebook Page. What’s worse is that the technique was used by a Social Media Agency, which should be aware of how useless this kind of action is. Let me share it with you, it all started when I saw this Ad:
Very basic but effective. When you’re promoting 
broad interest stuff, doing an ad like this usually results in a high CTR and Like rate. The ad is clearly targeted to men … and we like cool cars. There’s nothing long or confusing to read, just a call to action: Like It ! I can assure you it works. We did an ad like this months ago for a Book page and the top performing ads said things such as: “Love reading ? Like PAGEX now !”. There’s nothing strange about that at first, just a well designed ad to get cheap Facebook likes. But, if you look at the Ad you’ll notice something strange. In the social part of the Ad it says that 65,799 people like Butterfly Networking … What ? Wasn’t this ad about Cool Cars ? Here’s where it starts to get spammy.
As reported by Inside Facebook, there is a new section on Facebook for ‘recommended pages’, which shows users a list of pages they might be interested in. The new ‘recommended pages’ will also include a list of users’ page invites, which is making a comeback as it was left out of the last redesign in September. This feature is very useful as it often happens to forget about some pages our frind recommended in the past. The new ‘recommended pages’ section also introduces a search feature.
You can find Recommended pages via the ‘Like Pages’ link on the left-hand side of Facebook. Once at the page you are given suggested pages in one column with a Like button directly to the right of these suggestions.These reccommended pages should be more relevant to users as they’re based off of recent check-ins, pages they have visted, Open Graph activity, and friend connections. You can also now search for a specific page.
Is one more colorful, detailed, and larger Facebook mobile ad better than multiple ads?
Facebook is testing their mobile ‘Pages You May Like’ by making them more eye-catching and super-targeted to hopefully catch your attention when scrolling through your news feed. As TechCrunch reported in their article announcing the new mobile pages tests, Facebook mobile ads have only been around since March, but they’ve been hard at work improving their mobile ad space. This new look includes colorful banners, a ‘like’ button straight on the ad, an explanation of what the business does, and more direct targeting to show users one highly relevant Page instead of three.
We’ve previousy talked about the importance of click-throughs, and how to stop their decline by adjusting the frequency of your Facebook ads. We discussed how showing your Facebook ads at the right frequency to the right target audience can help optimize your Facebook ads.
Now the latest study by Facebook and Datalogix (an in-store purchase tracker) has shown us that Facebook ad frequency is highly important for Facebook advertisers trying to generate in-store sales. While CTR is still a relevant part of Facebook ad optimization, the focus of Facebook advertising for offline products should be on the number of people the ad reaches, or the exposure of the ad. Think about it: if brands are adversting products like cars, cleaning supplies, and cups of coffee-people don’t buy those things online. There is no direct link between them clicking on a Facebook ad and whether or not they’ll actually go out and buy these things in a store, car dealership, coffeeshop, etc. Datalogix saw that an overwhelming number of sales, 99% to be specific, were by people who saw an ad online, but did not click on the ad itself.
Just in case you’re interested in how Facebook is doing, here’s some key information you need to know from yesterday’s Earning call for Q3.
Short story: Facebook is growing … a lot. And Wall Street seems to have liked what they heard, Facebook stocks climbed 10% in after-hours trading.
And that’s it ! Of course we’re very happy about these results and the 36% growth of advertising. Also the number of local businesses testing Facebook Ads is really good. From our experience we’ve seen that Facebook Ads, with its ability to target up to the zip code, works really well for local stuff.
This was meant to be a very serious corporate post about today’s announcement of the Wind Business Factor winner, but considering it’s 2:40 am and I’m writing this post from a hotel room in Rome, you should have a clear idea why I don’t really feel like boring you with something too formal.
Let’s start from the beginning … it’s been a hell of a day ! The alarm clock was set for its usual 6am time, as it has been for the last two months, but don’t worry it’s not only for work but mainly because of our new hire, Gala (we’ll talk more about her soon), who needs to be taken for a walk on the street at that time. Anyway, the extra work-hours in the morning are not so bad, you know … no phone ringing or annoying coworkers at that time.
It’s an exciting period here in the office. You know, developing a product as complex as 
AdEspresso is no easy task. It requires passion, focus, a gifted team, and lots and lots of work. Even with all of our hard work, a product like AdEspresso cannot be created overnight. During the first phase of the product development there’s a lot of core stuff to write: Facebook Ads API, backend systems to update and analyze data, optimization algorithms, user management and so on. I don’t want to bore you with this stuff but, as the CEO of the company, you can understand my pain in those long months when AdEspresso existed only on paper and, fortunately, on some static interface layouts, while everyone was working on very important parts of the project which could not be seen or played with yet.
How to name a startup company? Sometimes, you wake up in the morning with a name in mind, you check for domain availability, and boom! You’re good to go. But other times, it’s much more complicated.
When we started our new business, we had a clear vision of the product. We wanted to develop a simple and beautiful service for managing and optimizing Facebook ads. We focused on product development and ignored the naming issues for many months, until February 2012. By then, we’d developed a great prototype–but we needed a great name to go with it.
