http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18813237

The BBC recently covered the potential downside to Facebook advertising through setting up a fake company profile in order to drive up a fake brand’s number of ‘likes’. It questioned the validity of the potential customers, the location they come from and why a brand should be paying for this ‘like’ acquisition. What it didn’t do however, is create a fair test where Facebook advertising could showcase it’s unique ability to allow advertisers to granularly target customers and understand the worth of social engagement.

No knowledgeable marketer would set up a campaign the way the BBC did under the fake profile name ‘Virtual Bagel’. UK advertisers are more intelligent than the BBC gives them credit. Facebook advertising is all about picking your target demographic, creating compelling ad copy and images then understanding why users would want to like your profile page. Good marketers these days also understand that it’s not just about the number of fans. They’re moving on to understanding how they engage with these fans more effectively. All digital advertising can be wasteful if created and targeted incorrectly. For example, the BBC would find it achieves a worse outcome if it were to bid on highly generic keywords in Google AdWords, target the whole of Asia and didn’t provide relevant content or a landing page for the user.

The BBC also focused on the number of fake profiles, where users would not end up engaging with your brand or purchasing a product or service. In search Google has to deal with click fraud which has been far more of a problem than the possible 5% of fake Facebook profiles suggested by the BBC’s experiment. 95% of the 901 Million users on Facebook are genuine potential customers; this level of reach cannot be underestimated.

So how should advertisers use Facebook?

In order to create granular, scalable and cost efficient campaigns advertisers should be using an Ad Management tool such as Upcast, an approved Facebook technology provider. Using Upcast, the advertisers can create highly customisable and relevant audience segments. They can then multivariant test and optimise based on ad copy, image and targeting elements in order to reduce the cost per like. Upcast’s direct response approach caters for external site campaigns where advertisers have a strict CPA or ROI target. Precise keyword interests should then be constantly refined based upon reporting data to continually improve the campaign’s relevancy and reach.

The BBC forgot to mention how Facebook Ad Management tools have revolutionised results and the use of various market place ads for advertisers. Facebook not only has gargantuan user reach at advertisers’ finger tips, but it’s now used as a branding tool, social engagement platform and direct response channel. Facebook’s client list comprises every house hold name brand in the world. They can’t all be wrong can they? As with every beast, it just needs the right tool to tame it.

Digital marketing still remains the most measurable and accountable channel of advertising. Google has created its revenue from the flexibility of Google AdWords, allowing users to have the maximum amount of control over their campaigns. Facebook is following suit and is allowing API partners like Upcast to create innovative features to increase performance and control of its Facebook campaigns such as enabling us to offer:

• Integration with any tracking solution;
• Ad copy, image and targeting element report and optimisation;
• Super Groups – ad level budget and bid control;
• Frequency Capping – protect ad fatigue and increase reach;
• Optimised CPM – automate Facebook action optimisation;
• Automated Strategies – rules based and follow suggested bids;
• Mobile Targeting – report and optimise on Mobile performance.

www.upcastsocial.com

One of the most innovative features added to Upcast is a new Facebook advertising option called ‘Optimized CPM’. Optimized CPM allows advertisers to prioritise their campaign goals towards more down-stream actions such as page likes, app installs, reach, clicks or social impressions. We expect this to prove useful when running on-Facebook campaigns as often advertisers are less interested in clicks and have defined their success criteria based on end results, such as driving page likes or installs of an application.

The innovative Super Group feature in Upcast – which allows automatic splitting of ads into separate campaigns for more thorough multivariate ad testing – has also been improved to allow custom naming conventions to be applied to campaign names. This offers advertisers complete flexibility when deciding on how they want their campaigns named. The naming conventions can then be used for more sophisticated filtering, budget control, and internal reporting systems.

We’ve also improved and added more advanced filtering to our Campaigns and Ads Editing sections to allow for faster and more effective bulk editing. This will allow advertisers more control, save them time and ultimately improve performance.

Please get in touch with us at info@upcastsocial.com if you’d like to hear more about how Upcast can improve your Facebook advertising.

When running Facebook Ad campaigns we’ve found some advertisers are having problems when broad targeting people. Advertisers have told us that they’d start advertising to an audience and their budget would spend very quickly and the frequency would be very high (frequency being the average number of times each user has seen the ad).

This is possibly caused by a number of factors; however, the obvious issue is that unlike display advertising, you can’t cookie individual users on Facebook. Therefore, there are limited ways to control ad frequency. Given that some users spend a lot of time on Facebook, the chances are that these heavy users are helping to inflate ad frequency and therefore budget is spent at the expense of reach.

The end result is that the advertiser uses up their budget and only reaches a relatively small audience with their message.

Our solution to this is the Upcast Frequency Strategy. It works by hyper-segmenting audiences and allows the user to set a frequency cap on the number of ad displays. Upcast automatically pauses ads once the frequency hits the cap. It’s a very quick strategy to set up and the system takes care of everything for the user.

The results from early testing are very encouraging. The Frequency Strategy campaigns run to date have all achieved at least 40% more reach than normal campaigns while reducing total impressions and frequency by more than 50%.

If you’d like to see this in action, fill in our Request a Demo form for more information.

There are a host of new features and back-end improvements to the tool that will quietly enhance your user experience. Here are the key items that will be most visible to you, although there are several more not listed:

a)            In bulk campaign edit, you can now choose to increase/decrease the budgets of all selected campaigns by a fixed percentage or amount e.g. “increase by 10%” or “decrease by £20.00”

b)            The “Status” filter in bulk campaign edit now contains a ‘scheduled’ option so you can filter in scheduled campaigns only

c)            The “Name” filter in bulk campaign edit now contains  ’Does not contain’ and ‘Does not end with’ so you can exclude campaigns from your filter based on a portion of their name

d)            The maximum number of filters in bulk campaign edit has been increased from 4 to 10, so you can carry out even finer-grained filtering

e)            New image uploader which is easier to use and more reliable than the old system

f)             Faster updates and creates of ads/campaigns across the system

g)            Safety check for bid/budget when creating supergroups, which will prevent you from creating an ad where the max bid is more than half of the campaign budget

h)            Safety check when using existing supergroups for bulk upload – if the end date of the supergroup is in the past it will prompt you to change this

If you have any questions about the above or want to experience Upcast for yourself, please contact us through our website.

1. Right-hand side bar

On average adverts in the side bar have between 5 and 10 times more engagement than anywhere else. These adverts will be shown to those not yet currently fans of your page, though sponsored stories may also be shown to fans. These can now contain a status update or post rather than the traditional “like” ad.

2. Newsfeed on homepage

For fans and friends of fans, sponsored stories and friend interaction with your page will now appear in the newsfeed. Some of these adverts will be organic e.g. a friend ‘liking’ your page and others will be paid.

3. Newsfeed on mobile

Facebook’s mobile app was previously advertisement free. Now paid ads will appear in the timeline on the phone similarly to how they appear on normal facebook.

4. Logout ads

These appear on the log out screen and are optional for premium users. This gives the advert almost the whole screen so are far more striking.

The other change is that pages will now be able to make an advert in the form of an offer. A post which is designed to advertise a certain discount which can then be used to gain more momentum as users are shown when a friend signs up for the offer, and also when they utilise the offer and are therefore encouraged to do the same.

All premium adverts will now be charged either by impressions or reach, there is no longer a per click option, though this is not the case for the standard marketplace ads. However the reach generator will guarantee that all posts aimed at fans reach at least 75% of fans each month.