Posts Tagged ‘social network click quality’

Click Quality And Facebook Social Ads

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

I have been doing a lot of work with Facebook social ads recently, and thought it would be a good time to write about the click quality issues I see with their program.

Why Use Social Network Ads?

As the strangle hold on Internet traffic by Google increases and the Yahoo/Microsoft partnership rumbles on and on, there is very little leverage an advertiser can bring to bear on Google in an effort to improve their advertising deal. There is an emerging option in the Social networks, in particular the ones developing their own pay per click advertising rather than partnering with the big search engines (Bebo/Yahoo, MySpace/Google).

What Are Facebook Social Ads?

Facebook has created it’s own advertising scheme where CPC or CPM ads can be displayed on the bottom left hand side of a Facebook user’s profile and example is shown below. In this case the ad is for Hilton Hotels.

The system allows a small text only or image and text ad to be created. This can then be linked to a site external to Facebook or to a page create on the site to advertise goods or services.

Due to the nature of the site and the information you supply, there is a lot of demographic targeting available for advertisers. Your ad can be targeted to location, sex, keywords (pre-defined in Facebook), age and educational status.

Facebook actions Social Actions are the novel part of this service. You ad can be displayed next to the normal social actions of Facebooks users. For example my friend Joe Bloggs buys tickets for the band The Click Quality Consultants (they are an indie guitar band - very cool). If this band were running a Facebook ad with social actions enabled, the ad would be displayed next to my friends updates, possibly making me click on their ad to buy tickets too.

The system uses a costing model similar to Google. You set a max cost per click for your ad, then a bidding system kicks in and if your max CPC is higher than your rival, your ad is dispalyed.  You cost per click is also automatically reduced to 1 cent above your competitor in line with the Google model.

With an auidience of 70 million users growing by an estimated 250k per day, this is not a Google size or even Yahoo sized audience, but it has an engaged focused group of users which, when targeted correctly can provide decent returns for advertiers.

The Problems/Benefits As I see Them.

  • My main concern is with the pricing of ads. In a Google or Yahoo campaign, I can see who I am competing with. With a Facebook ad, you must take it on on (forgive the pun) face value. Since there are no metrics to analyse, how do I know that Facebook is not artificially inflating the prices?
  • All clicks have their referrer marked as Facebook, so it is difficult to find out which clicks are organic Facebook activity and which are paid for. This makes analysis of the traffic difficult.
  • There is no way to create an exclusion list. If a Facebook users was maliciously clicking on your ads, you must manually contact the Ad support team for an investigation.
  • Analysis of the conversion rate, depth, length and bounce rate of Facebook clicks found that this was comparable on the site I was working with to organic traffic, so I can conclude in this instance that the click quality from Facebook was as good as organic Google traffic.
  • Text ads do not work on Facebook. As can been seen from the image above, a Facebook profile is very busy. A split test of text only versus image and text showed a 230%+ difference in click through. You need a compelling image ad for Facebook ad sucess.
  • The system is not as mature as the search engines programs, this leads me to think that their click fraud filters will not be as advanced, therefore click fraud will slip through unnoticed.
  • There is no content network of advertisers taking a cut for clicks, so publisher click fraud is not an issue.
  • Excellent demographics.  If you have a product which matches the audience it is a brilliant way to advertise.

Further Information

I am talking about this subject in much greater details at this months Webinar from the Click Quality Coucil, check out their website for details on how to join this event.

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Use Social Networks to Combat Click Fraud

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

In a series of post I have been discussing social networking sites and their entry into the PPC field, and analysing a couple of the most useful ones with respect to click fraud resistance.

The three articles can be read at:

The conclusion I make over three posts is yes, selected social networks are more resilient to click fraud.

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