FB Ads: Power Editor, Ads in Newsfeed, New CTAs & Dark Posts

A round up of FB best practices incorporating some of their recent changes BOTH to just posting and advertising…

TRADITIONAL FB ADS IN NEWSFEED
We've noticed that the traditional ads you've been doing (like the David Mark one) have not been set up to appear in the newsfeed but in the right hand column.
Its worth noting that although promoted posts (to friends of fans of a page) appear in the newsfeed, traditional Facebook targeted ads (to say fans of a comparative author) don't have to be stuck in that far right column and can now appear in the newsfeed too and the received wisdom is that they are way more effective when done in this way.

POWER EDITOR
There have been some significant changes to Facebook posts and ads in the last month.
To see these you need to be able to access your accounts via Power Editor, an app only current available on Chrome.
Power Editor gives you more detailed tracking / ways of laying out data not dissimilar to Google ads ad manager.
You still won't get conversion rates to third parties (as we don't own Amazon's shopping basket and can't place cookies in it). BUT it is possible to track to our own shopping baskets (if we were to run a campaign targeting our own site). It is arguable that without some products that are unique / very well priced to us we won't often want to do this. But if we do our team will need a heads up to make sure we have placed some tracking in the metadata / pixel in the shopping basket.
In addition, if we were to pay for advertising to send people to a sign up box with mail chimp we could track that conversion rate if we set up the tracking from our end and within Facebook properly.

NEW CALLS TO ACTION
ALSO, by accessing via Power Editor (and this is currently the only way to do this) you get to use several new calls to action on your Facebook Ads AND in Facebook Posts (Shop Now, Download etc.). As well as generally being generally useful this has an impact on the limited text you have for any ads. You no longer need to "say" Shop Now etc. its not part of the word count.

DARK POSTS
On top of this, a lot of the v savvy digital gurus are creating Dark Posts for their advertising.

Now we know that when posting from a page an image is much more engaging in people's news feeds. BUT the image you are posting is never a direct link to somewhere else (the image is NOT the link) AND tracking is hard. Also, likes and comments don't show up. AND if you run a post with an image that’s got too much text in it it just gets blocked by FB and you no clicks and no notification this has happened (but you are not charged).

I won't go into too much detail the tech of setting up a dark post but it needs to be a certain percentage image to text (tool to test here http://20percentrule.info), it needs to be 1200×627 pixels etc.

FB advertising whether organic through fantastic content at no cost or via paid for ads has developed into more of a dark art in the last 6 months. It is no longer, post some interesting text and go.

Positioning

I hardly ever have to hand code pages as I use various wordpress pages. But occasionally I have to drag out of my memory how to do the odd thing. Especially with splash pages which are almost always hand coded.

Anyway, absolute positioning. A little reminder for myself...

Facebook Redesign & Books

So the new Facebook design is rolling out.

"Interests" are gaining more emphasis as a result.

This is because activities are getting their own feed on the left rather than being within general updates on the right.

When Spotify was integrated into FB news feeds record labels saw a massive surge in revenue from plays as friends virally shared what they were playing (they'll get even more now).

The Goodreads app has been integrated for a while (and its growth generally has had a lot to do with FB) but it looks like it will have more prominence in people's feed.

ALSO, you will see someone is reading something click on the photo and add to your "to read" list. Feels like we're a short jump away from someone like Amazon ebooks (or similar) hooking into this but for some reason its just Goodreads for now.

http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2013/03/13/facebook-begins-rolling-out-new-one-column-timeline-with-increased-emphasis-on-interests

http://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/411-now-it-s-even-easier-to-show-off-your-love-of-books-on-facebook

I am one of the very small number that have the new search in beta at the moment (which will have a big impact on advertising, but has a lot of issues, more on that another time). The new look timeline is actually rolling out very quickly though. If anyone spots they have it please holler as I'd like to see it in action.

Everything you ever wanted to know about GA but were afraid to ask...

It seems like every business I've worked in has gone through a phase of being a teensy weensy bit obsessed with stats. I can understand it. Its the interwebs. Its science right? Anyway, I wrote a summary for my team of all the issues around GAs especially in the context of driving traffic to third party sites like Amazon and I've decided its probably a good idea to make it into a post for future reference. These things change over time but not by much. As I keep saying, you cannae change the laws of physics. You cannot measure clicks to, only clicks from!

So the main thing to takeaway re: analytics is that its fantastic for measuring trends but rubbish for accurate numbers. So, it should be helpful to see for example if press or banner ads had an impact, if the graph went up but it won't tell you exactly how many people visited, clicked or bought. Even when you own the whole ecosystem (landing page, your own ecommerce basket etc.) its trends not numbers.

GENERAL ISSUES WITH ANALYTICS

Most of the general issues people think they know about with GA have gone. Sessions ending, browsers shutting and re-opening are not as big issues as they once were but they still exist for some people.

However, the "Do not track" law is a big problem. This is a new standard whereby when you download a new browser you have to have the option now to have "no cookies ever". 

Worse than that the new IE is default set to "no cookies ever". Its not huge yet but the "do not track" law could be a big game changer both for GA and behavioural advertising.

This makes everything a bit rough and ready just for basic visitor data even. 

You will always be under reporting with GA. Its always important to focus on trends not numbers for traffic or any data supplied via GA.

However, there are bigger problems:

1. If you do not own the site you are sending a user on to this adds another problem for calculations. 

2. If you do not own the shopping basket you are sending someone on to / you cannot place cookies in it then its impossible to measure conversion rates.

SETTING UP

General traffic to a website is trackable via Google Anlaytics code. We have one for all our quercubooks.co.uk/xxx sites and we just drill down in the back end to those pages to see data specific 

We can either drill down if its off our CMS to that page or if its an externally built page the web developer should ask for that code each time he sets it up. Otherwise = NO DATA! 

BASIC DATA

Pageview data is given by GA but its not helpful, ignore. 

Always the focus should be on unique visitors.

There are a lot of other stats which I could walk you through but I'd say this is the thing to focus on.

CLICKS ON PAGE

This is easily calculated when tracking click throughs to a site you own. 

You can use in page analysis to view the whole page with the number of clicks on each element. Lovely. You can switch this on right now for our main site.

The number of people coming to amazon (or any external page) via the landing page (or any other page we do not own) not so easy.

Link Attribution

This is great for tracking internally and keeping an eye on email to website to shopping basket where you own the whole ecosystem but you can't tag an amazon url you don't own that url. It won't work. Event tracking is the only option.

Event Tracking

What developers can do is use java script to send people to a page they don't know about for a split second before they go through to amazon. They can sit at that page and count the number of people popping through

without them knowing. This is called event tracking. It means installing some javascript and reconfiguring all outbound links accordingly (see here http://bit.ly/IXhK2J) 

We can then see the results in our GA account.

BUT, a lot of people never bother setting this up. And there's a reason for that. Its not particularly accurate either. The reason being that you are trying to hack the processes of browsers and they don't like that. They can detect spammy / hacky functionality and they won't always let it work.

It will always be under representing and you will never know by how much.

AFFILIATES

This is one way to look at sales. This is the only tracking Amazon allows. Its not accurate as it won't track you everywhere but again if you suddenly see a spike in Alex affiliate sales you know something is working via one of your affiliate links.

AJAX/FLASH/ANIMATED SITES

With these sort of sites everything happens on the page. This makes it almost impossible to track whats going on. Event tracking is ALWAYs the answer for seeing whats going on on the page. With fewer sites being built in Flash its less and less of a problem but something to be aware of.

HTML5

This works fine with GA (but experiences all the usual GA problems already discussed)

SERVER BASED ANALYTICS / EXTERNAL COMPANIES PAID FOR DATA TRACKING SOFTWARE

I am only mentioning these in case someone starts googling and thinking they have "found" the answer when they haven't.

Server based analytics means the math completely outside of google with a developer. It can give you page views not uniques so hardly useful.

You can pay for expensive tracking systems. These IMHO are only worthwhile when you are doing Adwords campaigns yourself, you own the whole ecosystem, you are churning though massive numbers and you need to analyse in detail which of numerous differently worded ads are affecting click through. 

Link Building & Analysis

As part of our research (for our objective settings for the year) we have been looking at link building.

Our hope is that we can see both where inbound links to our benchmarked competitors are coming from and see if we can replicate.

The idea is also to nab the blog names for online PR if its a blog as well as analyse what types of blogs are linking into them etc.

We've been wondering for a while whether a reading group area or similar would be useful. We'll be surveying our visitors on that as well of course!

Enter your URL into https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com. Click on "Inlinks", then in the "Show Inlink" drop-down box, select "Except from this subdomain"

This process can be repeated for a range of competitors or other types of site.

The Long Tail

Its a classic article but its worth revisiting especially seeing as it takes publishing as its focus.

rfintentindex

Another intense week of training with the IDM. Knuckling down to using the SOSTAC approach for digital marketing planning. That's... (it helps me to write this out so hey!)...

- SITUATION ANALYSIS
- OBJECTIVES
- STRATEGY
- TACTICS
- ACTIONS
- CONTROL

Anyway, as you can imagine there's a lot of focus on Situation Analysis split into market / customers. On the customer side something that cropped up was the usefulness of the rfintentindex in understanding the audiences you're targeting.

The idea is that rather than segmenting on the basis of demographics (or demographics alone) you can approach in terms of intent.

You can read more about it at www.intentindex.com.

SEO: Key Word or Key Phrase?

Keyphrase (short for ‘keyword phrase’) is the focus rather than keyword, because search engines attribute more relevance to an exact phrase match on a web page (a phrase that matches the users’ search term) than to a word match.

Influencers vs. The Moderately Connected Majority

Influencers have been a buzz word for a long time in online PR and social media marketing. And... I've never been completely convinced by it myself. I'm not saying they are not important but say Penny Red shouts loudly about something, thats nice. But when my old school friend who rarely has an opinion talks about something at the same time my apolitical brother does... well...

And that goes for music, books, products or whatever. I know Mashable know their stuff and today I was really interested to hear them talking about this but I'm only going to seriously think about consuming it if other less techy / influential people seem to be jumping on the band wagon.

Anyway, this is what prompted these thoughts:

"...Watts and Dodds (2007) argue that the "influentials hypothesis" is based on untested assumptions and in most cases does not match how diffusion operates in the real world. They comment that 'most social change is driven not by influentials, but by easily influenced individuals influencing other easily influenced individuals'. -- Internet Marketing Strategey, Implementation and Practive (Chaffey, Prentice Hall)

I suppose if I think of the Mashable example then I think the influencer (in this case the news feed from Mashable) acts as a primer for those "on the fence" about something and "the moderately connected majority" perhaps the catalyst.

Interesting though isn't it?

Engagement

An interesting bit of info from my course book for the Diploma:

"..in most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little and 1% of users account for almost all the action.." --Jakob Nielsen

Nielsen suggests some participation strategies.

First, there should be easy methods for a visitor to contribute, clicking a rating or commenting without registering.

Second, automate contributions, but showing related recommendations or the most read articles.

Third, provide templates for response.

Fourth, reward users by giving them accolades for contribution and finally promote participation through design or featuring top reviewers.