Posted in Blogs on May 01, 2012 by Administrator
Nick O'Neill on September 9, 2010 11:38 AM
 When getting started with online advertising, one of the first questions people will ask is, “Should I bid on a CPM or CPC basis?” Ultimately it’s a personal preference for most advertisers, however this guide should help answer your questions and determine which you should use. By default, most people go the CPC route, however there are legitimate reasons to occasionally bid on a CPM basis. Read on to figure out which you should use.
How Facebook Ads Work
Before jumping in to the difference between cost per click (CPC) ads and cost per thousand impressions (CPM) ads, we thought we’d provide a basic over view of how Facebook’s ad system works. Ultimately, Facebook’s ad network operates as a blind auction. Advertisers bid to have their ads displayed to various demographics. Facebook then displays those ads which perform the best (or generate the highest CPM for Facebook).
The Initial Test
While Facebook already knows how ads that have been running beyond the first few thousand impressions will perform, Facebook must test all new advertisements to determine their effectiveness. It’s during this period that the future of your ad will be determined. The goal for Facebook is to run those ads which will generate them the most revenue by run ads that maximize their CPM. Whether or not you bid on a CPC or CPM basis, Facebook must run your ads to determine their performance.
If your ad gets 10,000 impressions and no clicks, but you bid on a CPC basis, Facebook will eventually push your ad out of the rotation. This is because you aren’t generating any revenue for them. If however, you bid on a CPM basis, Facebook will be guaranteed that your impressions will at least generate some level of revenue.
Getting Flagged
If for some reason your advertisements start performing insanely well (for example, you are able to get your CPC down to $0.01), Facebook will eventually take note and check whether or not your ads violate any terms. If they don’t, they will be allowed to continue to run, but they won’t be optimized for as many impressions since they don’t maximize revenue for Facebook. It’s extremely rare that ads will attract exceptionally low CPCs, which is why Facebook will tend to investigate ads, or campaigns, that perform at this level.
There’s A Balance
The reality is that there’s a balance for all advertisements run on Facebook. While the company will run your ads, even if they are performing insanely well, they must come close to matching the “house CPM”. The best way to look at the “house CPM” is this: it’s the amount Facebook would have generated if they didn’t run your ad. As you begin running numerous ad campaigns, you can figure out what Facebook’s current house CPM is based on how your ad performs. This is for people who are running numerous campaigns however.
Ad Variations & Market Variations
The single largest determinants of the cost of your Facebook advertising campaigns are your ads and the target demographics you are going after. Some demographic groups have been targeted heavily and as such, have a much higher “house CPM”. As you adjust your ad title, body copy, and image, you will sometimes see dramatic variations in performance. This variation between ads and market prices (testing various demographic groups) is exactly what professional advertisers spend their time testing. Another word for these individuals is “optimizers”.
As defined in our Facebook marketing dictionary, optimization is the process through which an advertiser minimizes the cost of advertising while simultaneously maximizing performance to reach the ad campaign objectives. Optimization is a luxury for those that have money to test ads. If you don’t have the time to invest in optimization, you are going to end up spending more for your individual ads.
For some people this is fine as long as they know that they are getting some level of performance. However, for advertisers who are investing in the long-term performance of their campaigns, optimization is a process which is not only smart, it should be a requirement as it will maximize your performance and cut down your cost. Enough of this long winded response though, let’s get to the part you came here for: CPC vs CPM!
Why You Would Select CPC?
The most obvious reason for selecting a CPC bid is that you are only charged when people click on your ads. This means that in theory, you could get thousands of “free impressions”. The reality is that these “free impressions” aren’t really worth that much to you (yes, this is debatable). For advertisers, you want to pay for ads that generate results. However if you have a low budget ($5 a day or even $20) and you don’t have time for optimization, your best bet is to just go with CPC.
While an ad optimizer could also use CPC to test their campaigns, an expert optimizer will at some point use CPM for extremely high performance ads. The reason is that when bidding on a CPC basis, you will never pay less than your bid rate.
Why You Would Select CPM?
CPM, or cost per thousand impressions (aka. cost per thousand pageviews), is an advertising model that people running tens, hundreds, or even thousands of ad combinations will often use. The reason is that ads can perform better than Facebook’s recommended CPM and CPC bid rates. The only way to maximize your performance beyond a stated bid rate and figure out the lowest possible bid is to run on a CPM basis.
The reason is that your CPM bid has nothing to do with how well it will actually perform. In other words, I could bid $1.00 for 1,000 impressions, but if my click through rate is exceptionally high, my ads could end up obtaining a CPM of $0.10 despite the fact that I bid $1.00. In turn, my ads will outperform Facebook’s estimated bid rates. Keep in mind, if you are running CPM campaigns, you must monitor your ads closely for two reasons:
- You could burn through your budget on low performing ads
- Your ad performance will decrease over time, in turn pushing your effective campaign CPM up over time
Ultimately It Comes Down To CPA
While you can’t currently bid through Facebook on a cost per action (CPA) basis, advertisers need to measure how their ads perform on a conversion basis. Whether you want a user to become a fan of your page, download an ebook, install an application, pay for some digital good, or something else, the ultimate cost is how much you are paying for a user to perform an action. If for some reason you are just looking to drive traffic to your site, and you don’t care about performance (which makes little sense), you could try to minimize your CPC. However if you were just looking to buy traffic you could easily go to StumbleUpon and buy traffic at $0.05 per visitor.
Your Best Bet
Confused? Don’t worry! If you aren’t spending a lot of money on ads, and you are new to Facebook ads, your best bet is to bid on a CPC basis. This way, you are hedging against your exposure to low performing advertisements. Additionally, the real test that you want to figure out is how to maximize your click through rate (CTR) within your ads. Whichever have the highest click through rate will tend to be the best performing over time.
Over the coming weeks we will go into more details about how to measure the performance of your campaigns and go into more detail about the ads and the various terms. If you want to stay up to date on the latest Facebook marketing news and tips, click here to subscribe to our Facebook marketing weekly newsletter.
Posted in Blogs on March 23, 2011 by Administrator
Christopher Hosford
March 23, 2011 - 11:31 am EDT
While 2010 was dominated by talk of new paradigms, social media marketing's influence on other channels was just coming into focus last year. This year the picture is becoming a lot clearer, particularly in how social is driving search marketing. “As social media continues to stake its claim as the dominating force of the Internet, the entire landscape of search engine optimization will have to change to accommodate it,” said Horst Joepen, CEO of search analytics company Searchmetrics Inc. According to a recent Searchmetrics projection for this year, “Social Media Optimization” will take an increasingly strong role in campaigns. The companies and agencies that will come out ahead of the game are those that start leveraging social media for scalable link-building efforts, according to the company.
“We've seen a lot of anecdotal evidence that collaboration with social campaigns helps search rankings,” said Jeff MacGurn, director-search engine optimization services at Covario Inc., which specializes in automated search engine optimization. MacGurn said that popular sentiment—the social “virality” of a campaign—can help gain search traction. “If we're talking Facebook with lots of "likes' or many retweets via Twitter, or if social bookmarking sites get lots of "up' votes, this associated content tends to perform really well with search engine results rankings,” he said. Brian Goffman, CEO of SEO company Optify Inc., said companies must participate actively to make this magic happen. “Real-time search results can now be influenced pretty directly,” Goffman said. “Here, what's influencing search results is basically how often you're making contributions and updates, and how people are following you. The marketer has more direct control and can influence how often comments are updated,” he said. The major search engines are already recognizing the impact of social and factoring social comments into query results. The Bing-Facebook partnership, forged last fall, means that search queries within Bing are now listed along with Facebook search results. “This underscores the power that Facebook has on the Internet at the moment,” Joepen said. “Right now, we can only speculate on how this will pan out, but if executed efficiently, this could change searching for information online as we know it.” Meanwhile, Google isn't standing still. The search giant's universal search results return keyword mentions in social, including videos on its social sharing site, YouTube. Gary Vaynerchuk, a video blogger, views social media as the glue that creates this kind of synergy among marketing channels. “It's like a friendly Ping-Pong match,” Vaynerchuk says in his book, “The Thank You Economy” (Harper Business, 2011). “Develop creative work that allows the platforms to rally, to work together to extend your story, continue the conversation and connect with your audience.”
Conversations get going for a variety of reasons, among them humor. Supply chain software company Kinaxis, for example, has as part of its social outreach devised a video spoof called the “Late Late Supply Chain Show,” featuring comic turns by Kinaxis staffers. “Laughter is an important part of our site,” said Kirsten Watson, the company's director-corporate marketing. “It creates a personality for the company and shows a little bit of our culture. And, of course, in the supply chain business, laughter is really the best medicine when things go wrong.” Watson also noted the more practical usefulness of dovetailing social marketing with search. At Kinaxis, she said, a consistent effort to optimize social content with pertinent keywords produced a 270% increase in website traffic year over year comparing 2009 to 2008, a 320% increase in leads, and a 530% increase in traffic to the company's blog site.
Posted in Blogs on February 23, 2011 by Administrator
I had to write about the subject of filler text because of the humor that it gives me thinking of past projects. In the past I have created art for a custom that hasn't given us any content. In that case we have to put placeholder text that is about the same length of the content we are waiting for. The humor comes from when we get a call from a client that asks why we put "FRENCH" in the article, text or subject matter. Why they thought it was "FRENCH" is beyond me and why they would thingk that I would write their content, without telling them, is also concerning. Some clients would get down right agitated. After explaining to them that we haven't received any content for this piece so we just added "Greeking". It doesn't matter how easy you say it. "IT's just a place holder"! They stil are offended... to some degree.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Why do we use it?
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).
Where does it come from?
Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum "Greeking" is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32.
The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.
Posted in Blogs on February 20, 2011 by Administrator
Your a company that has a website and you have no idea what to do with it. With almost 200,000,000 websites with Google searching over ONE Trillion web pages [YES THAT'S A "T"] it's no wonder how technology must change to just keep up with demand. So you see keeping your website interactive with the world is extremely important if you want to improve your foot print in todays economy. In the recent past with the crash of the world's economy we as a whole have looked to more creative ways to get our brands out there. The days of dumping money into radio, in print, and on TV are gone. Now all advertising has to be measurable. The internet was born to has measurement capabilities. The web is still in it's infancy and will continue to grow like my giant 15 year old son. If you feed it good food and make them exercise everyday they will take on their own challenges and soon will take care of themselves [hopefully letting us back in their lives every once and a while]. Now this may seem crazy, but if you build a website that is interactive and interesting the friends of viewers will tell their friend and soon you will have the viral effect. Everyone is looking for the next best idea. It may be one of yours. Don't let anyone tell you your idea is "dumb". The best ideas may seem dumb now but everything changes.... EVERYDAY.
Now let's get back to your IDEA. How will the web help you get the word out. As seen in the amount of web pages out there you can't help feel the competition in your own back yard. Start by doing something, anything. We tell our clients to put the name of their website on everything they print, say and advertise on the radio and newspapers. Give them a reason to go there and once they go there give them a reason to stay. Information is cheap if your expertise is the reason that they would hire you in the first place. Create a blog that tells the consumer why you are good at what you do. If you are a carpenter you may want to tell your audience that if you oil your hard wood furniture once a month it will increase it's life by 30%. It's all about information. Take your expertise to the pages of the "WORLD WIDE WEB".
Posted in Blogs on November 03, 2010 by Administrator
Let's explore the need to develop external links back to your site.
There are the manual, task oriented, and time consuming search and enter all of your information techniques. Directories are great for linking , but how do you get linked back to by the searcher themslf? Well create a need! Create a demand for your intellectual property. There has to be a reason why people will want to come to you. Your content needs to show off your talents. We get the proverbial "I don't need marketing, our clients just need the website as a resource" a lot. How this is even possible that people don't want to spread the word about their talents is beyond me. It happens though and then when the customer see all that the internet can do they realize they better rethink this. Lets face it, most of the millionaires that are coming up today have gained their wealth through the internet. Its no joke and the band wagon will leave the horse and buggy behind in an instant. The internet is your best friend and your worst enemy at times. Disinformation is also out there, so watch out for the stupid people out there. OK LINK BUILDING TO GAIN SEARCH ENGINE POULARITY STATUS. Here are a few to take note of but please create valuable information that people will want to look at. Most people have an insatiable desire to learn so that's why self help tips are so important.
1. Develop a TOP 100 list". These get Dugg all the time, and often become "authority documents". People can't resist linking to these.
2. Create 10 easy tips to: help you [Subject Matter] articles.
3. Develop a need for people to return with a note that the next article will show "HOW TO..."
4. Research a list of vendors that can help with the topic of choice. ex. Aloha Diners Club is a great source for inexpensive meals out on the town. I just slipped in one of our businesses. If you were to click on it even once you've helped me get that domain on the search engine best source list.
5. Create a resource lists for a specific topic
6. Create a list of the top 10 myths for a specific category. Be a myth buster if possible.
7. Create a list of gurus/experts. If you impress the people listed well enough, or find a way to make your project look somewhat official, the gurus may end up linking to your site or saying thanks. (Sometimes flattery is the easiest way to strike up a good relationship with an "authority".)
8. Make your content easy to understand so many people can understand and spread your message. (It's an accessibility thing.)
9. Put some effort in to minimize grammatical or spelling errors, especially if you need authoritative people like librarians to link to your site.
10. Have an easily accessible privacy policy and about section so your site seems more trustworthy. Including a picture of yourself may also help build your authority.
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