promise

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/ya3ssH2_cb4/israeli-raid-cancelled-after-very-stupid-facebook-post

If you’re in the military, here’s a tip: don’t put upcoming missions in your Facebook status. You wouldn’t think someone would need to tell you that, but here we are.

A raid on suspected militants in the West Bank was cancelled yesterday after an Israeli soldier updated his Facebook status to read “On Wednesday we clean up Qatanah, and on Thursday, god willing, we come home.” The solider has since, unsurprisingly, been relieved of combat duty for being a moron. He’ll also spend 10 days in prison for his update.

Trying to educate soldiers on the importance of not leaking classified info to Facebook, the Israel Defense Forces have started putting up new posters in bases:

In posters placed on military bases, a mock Facebook page shows the images of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syrian President Bashar Assad and Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. Below their pictures – and Facebook “friend requests” – reads the slogan: “You think that everyone is your friend?”

I really want to see one of those posters. Anyone in the IDF want to send us a picture? My email address is below. I won’t post it on Facebook, promise. [NY Times]

Tags: address, Ahmadinejad, Anyone, Assad, bank, Bashar, Below, combat, combat duty, Defense, duty, everyone, Facebook, friend, gawker, God, Hezbollah, hezbollah leader sheik hassan nasrallah, home, IDF, importance, info, Iranian, iranian president mahmoud, Israel, israel defense forces, israeli raid, israeli soldier, leader, Mahmoud, mahmoud ahmadinejad, militants, military, military bases, moron, Nasrallah, page, picture, President, president bashar assad, prison, promise, Qatanah, raid, Sheik Hassan, sheik hassan nasrallah, slogan, soldier, solider, someone, status, syrian president bashar assad, Thursday, Times, tip, update, Wednesday, West, west bank, yesterday

Friday, March 5th, 2010 digital No Comments

Branding is still a useful activity? Reach and frequency is still a useful metric?

Source: http://community.microsoftadvertising.com/blogs/analytics/archive/2009/07/06/getting-back-to-basics-why-web-advertising-needs-traditional-media-metrics.aspx

Getting Back to Basics – Why Web Advertising Needs Traditional Media Metrics

posted Mon, Jul 06 2009

by Young Bean Song MSFT

Trying to build a brand marketing campaign without traditional target reach and Gross Rating Points (GRP) estimates is like trying to diet without the concept of calories. The analogy of dieting and advertising works on many levels.

continue reading Young Bean Song…

My response…

RE: “Patty Wakeling, an industry veteran who leads Unilever’s Global Media Insights Group, recently reminded me that in today’s retail environment, the choice between the branded versus the generic option are separated by less than an inch on the shelf. It was a sobering reminder of the power of branding, and why so many companies are willing to spend so much to build their brand equity.” But in the case of Whole Foods’ own store brand, 365, many people perceive it to be better than branded options (or at least equivalent). So they tend to choose to buy the 365 product instead. In other cases, what used to be brand equity/value is now perceived as an undesirable premium. Take another example — the rise and popularity of Trader Joe’s where 80% of the products sold are house brands. Consumers care about the product and its quality and value; consumers no longer care (as much) about the brand that is slapped on the package if the contents inside suck.

A brand used to be a mark or symbol burned onto a cow’s butt to signify what ranch it came from. And if people knew the ranch had a good reputation for raising healthy cows, they would buy the cow. The brand helped simplify the purchase decision. These days, advertisers carefully manicure “brand messages” and shout them at target consumers using various one-way channels such as TV, print, radio, and banner ads. But like Scott Cook, Intuit, said, “A brand is no longer wht we tell the consumer its – its what the consumers tell each other it is.” So branding as we know it (advertisers shouting claims at target customers) is less relevant or even unwanted entirely by modern consumers. And brand equity, which used to be a large, fungible item on the balance sheet (technically known as “good will”) may be far less valuable today. Consumers don’t just take the advertisers’ word for it; they will do their own research and buy what is actually valuable and useful.

Companies that actually develop useful and valueable products or services that consistently deliver on their promise — Apple, Drobo, Zappos, JetBlue, etc. — can even cut out their brand advertsing entirely because their brand IS their consistent delivery on the promise of value and usefulness. For example, has Apple EVER claimed they have awesome design and are easy to use? NEVER! But their products consistently deliver on those 2 attributes. So that’s how modern users would describe Apple’s brand to their friends.

A “brand” is earned over time. “Branding” is no longer a useful activity (and furthermore it is damned expensive — media costs — and ineffective — because it is the advertiser making claims that modern consumers don’t believe, assuming they saw the ad in the first place).

From AdAge — people buying private label, generics, or store brands (quality of which are pretty comparable to name brands)

Private Labels winning the battle of the brands
http://adage.com/article?article_id=134791

What do you think?

Tags: advertising, advertising works, analogy, analytics, Apple EVER, Basics, Bean, blogs, brand, brand equity, brand marketing, brand messages, calories, Campaign, case, choice, concept, cow, diet, dieting, environment, equity, equity value, estimates, example, Foods, Global, global media, Gross, gross rating points, Group, GRP, house brands, inch, industry, industry veteran, Joe, Jul, marketing, marketing campaign, Media, media metrics, metrics, Mon, MSFT, option, Patty Wakeling, power, private labels, Product, promise, purchase decision, quality, ranch, Rating, reach, reading, reminder, response, retail environment, Scott Cook, shelf, Song, store, target, target consumers, today, trader joe, Traditional, traditional target, Unilever, value, value consumers, veteran, Web, web advertising, whole foods, Young

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 digital 3 Comments

Notes from the Field: Made Up Words; Digital Jargonisms

web potato – the new couch potato

digital natives – the kids who dont know what newspapers are or what linear TV is

digital immigrants – old(er) ad execs who arrived on the island of digital, praying someone would save them from it help them figure it out

professional malpractice – preaching about digital when you’ve never tweeted or facebooked

obd – obsessive branding disorder

twinterns – interns who were hired to twitter

timeshifting – watching TV at whatever-the-hell-time they want

placeshifting – watching TV at whatever-the-hell-place they want

addressable audience – old(er) ad execs thinking digital gives them more tools to target (address) individual consumers with unwanted ad messages

niche-busters – blockbusters but for smaller (niche) audiences

analog dollars for digital dimes – with the greater efficiency and measurability of advertising in digital mediums, for every dollar taken out of analog mediums, only dimes need to be put back into digital to achieve similar or greater effect

I know I am wasting half of my ad dollars; I just don’t know which half — is more like “I know I am wasting 99% of my ad dollars” (banner ad click through rates are generously at 1%, which means the other 99% is known to be, for sure, wasted — no more guessing necessary).

measured media = TV, print, radio — which equals not really measurable at all

(old) branding – the process of systematically duping customers into buying inferior products by mis-information, dis-information, and lying

(new) branding – consistently delivering on the promise of superior products through rapid, customer-driven innovation

re-intermediation – re-insertion of a digital middleman whose job it is to filter, prioritize, and deliver only what is relevant and timely

click farms – banks of low-wage workers who click google ads to earn a living rather than do farming

Tags: addressable audience, advertising, analog, audience, banner, banner ad, blockbusters, couch, couch potato, delivering on the promise, digital immigrants, Digital Jargonisms, digital mediums, digital natives, dimes, disorder, dollar, dont, driven innovation, effect, efficiency, execs, farming, filter, google, half, i know i am wasting half my marketing dollars, immigrants, inferior products, innovation, interns, island, job, malpractice, measurability, media tv, middleman, niche, niche audiences, niche-busters, obd, obsessive branding disorder, placeshifting, potato, print, prioritize, process, professional malpractice, promise, radio, someone, superior products, timeshifting, twinterns, twitter, wasting, watching tv, Web, web potato

Saturday, June 27th, 2009 digital 1 Comment

Facebook advertising metrics and benchmarks

Update Jan 2014

Facebook Advertising Benchmarks CTR CPC CPM by Augustine Fou from Dr Augustine Fou

Summary

Facebook click-through rates of 0.01 – 0.05% (Facebook CTRs)

Facebook effective CPMs turned out to be $0.01 – $0.19 (Facebook eCPMs)

Facebook average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25 (Facebook CPCs)

Other social media benchmarks from my experiments (Adwords, StumbleUpon, PayPerPost / Izea) can be found here.

Comparison of click-through rates for search ads versus display ads

As a scientist, I like to run experiments. And I like to make stuff. So my team and I made a few Facebook apps that solved needs that we had (a few samples listed below) and shared them publicly on Facebook to see if they were also useful to other people too.

I beta tested some apps with a few friends by inviting them directly. Then to get it out to a larger number of people, we decided to try Facebook advertising, the much-hyped, holy grail of display advertising on one of the largest and most active social networks.

http://apps.facebook.com/netflixr/

– visual discovery, share, and queue management interface for Netflix

http://apps.facebook.com/musicsamplr/

– visual discovery and sampling interface for music (Amazon backend)

http://apps.facebook.com/phreetings/

– create and send photo or video e-cards by drag and drop (Flickr and YouTube backend)

http://apps.facebook.com/visualfriends/

– visual display of your friends (closest ones have the most recent status updates)

http://apps.facebook.com/myfavethings/

– social commerce – I’ll buy what he bought; things I have, things I want

But what I found was eye-opening to say the least. Despite the potential of social ads where the social actions of your circle of friends could make the ads more targeted, none of the anticipated positive effects were observed. Despite the promise of mass reach, there was not the corresponding attention or clicks. And despite the use of demographics-based targeting, there was no statistically significant difference between different targets nor the control sample, running during the same time period.

What we saw were click-through rates of 0.01 – 0.05% — and the 0.01% often seemed like rounding because they did not report more than 2 decimal places. As a result of these click rates the effective CPMs turned out to be $0.01 – $0.19 and average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25. I’ve been running these Facebook ads for more than 12 months; and millions of impresisons later, there is no observable improvements to CTRs and thus CPMs and CPCs. But since I set up the campaigns to only pay when there is a click (CPC basis), I can let these run indefinitely because I am getting so few clicks, it’s not even making a dent on my credit card (which I use to pay for the ads).

detail of low click through rates of facebook display ads

Ideas for Facebook

In the spirit of openness, as an advertiser who wants to continue using Facebook advertising, perhaps there are a few things they can do to improve the effectiveness of Facebook display ads.

1. reduce the number of ads per page to 1 — displaying multiple ads artificially depresses click-through rates because users can only click on 1 thing at a time, even if they liked more than one of them. Displaying 3 on a page simply increases the denominator while the numerator does not increase — in the click-through rate equation: clicks / impressions.

2. make ads sharable – in the rare instance a user views an ad, it may or may not be relevant to her, but she may know that it is relevant and timely for a friend. By making ads sharable, she can click and send to a friend, who is very likely to find it useful and valuable, especially having been sent by a friend.

3. let users opt-in to ads in specific topic categories – when users are in the market for specific things, they are more likely to subscribe to pertinent news feeds, offers, etc. related to that topic or category. By giving users more power over what they want to see, it will also give advertisers more targeted and engaged prospects to target.

4. expand search-based advertising – when users search they are looking for something and are open to discovering something they didn’t know to ask for. So ads served up in response to a search is usually a lot more effective than ads served up simply when a page is loaded (display advertising). Facebook can serve display ads based on pertinent search queries.

Earth to Facebook… anyone listening?

By Dr. Augustine Fou. Dr. Fou is Group Chief Digital Officer at Healthcare Consultancy Group a group of agencies within the Omnicom family specializing in pharma and healthcare. He helps clients develop digital marketing programs or improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness existing campaigns via advanced analytics, social marketing, and digital strategy. You can read more of his writing on digital marketing on this blog and follow him on twitter @acfou.

Revision 6/30/2009: Facebook Click Fraud

Excerpt from TechCrunch: “Click fraud is serious business on the big search engine advertising networks because the bad guys can make serious money. Sign up for an Adsense account and put those ads on parked domain names or wherever. Then all you have to do is start clicking those ads like crazy, using bots or cheap labor.” On Facebook, “advertisers are clicking on competitor ads to drive up their costs and drive down their ROI.”

“So the bad guys just create thousands of fake Facebook accounts with a wide variety of demographic information. This sounds like a lot of work, but it’s highly automated. the going rate was just $10 per 100 accounts if you supply the unique email accounts. Once the accounts are created, they use software to fill out the varied demographic information, and that software also manages all these accounts. The fraudster then logs in to Facebook via these accounts and views the ads that are displayed. The right competitive ads come up and Bingo, the software then clicks them. Facebook rules allow an account to click any advertisement up to six times in a 24 hour period, and all those clicks are charged. All you need is a few accounts to view the ads and then click to the max.”

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/26/facebook-click-fraud-101/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/21/facebook-admit-click-fraud-problem-says-fix-coming-today/

Despite click fraud, the click through rates are still incredibly low. So if you subtract all the click fraud, is ANY advertiser making ANY money from facebook advertising?

Others have found similarly dismal click through rates from Facebook advertising

Source: http://www.friendswithbenefitsbook.com/2008/04/07/facebook-ad-click-through-rates-are-really-pitiful/

Facebook Ad Click-Through Rates Are Really Pitiful

April 7, 2008 – 5:03 pm

Quite by coincidence, I’ve encountered a few statistics on Facebook’s advertising platform. I thought I’d post links to the results I’ve uncovered, in case anybody is wondering about average CTR rates for Facebook.

First up, Rod Boothby got a click-through rate of 0.01%:

This week, I ran $105 worth of Facebook Fliers. That bought me 52,500 impressions. It looks like the flier bought me about an extra 500 site visits. That’s about $0.21 per hit.

Michael Ferguson ran a bunch of Facebook ads for Kinzin:

Click-through rates are abysmal. I was running the identical ad in about 15 different regions (you need to run them as separate ads to get the stats broken out), getting just over 10M views. Our average clickthrough rate was 0.06% (that’s 1 in 1513, for those counting at home). The best we did anywhere was 0.14%.

He later reports that the conversion rate was “at a pretty reasonable clip” at about 5%. By ‘conversion’, I think he’s meaning people who actually signed up for Kinzin’s free service. All of this stuff is contextual, but if visitors had to lay down money, the conversion rate would be considerably lower.

The folks at Valleywag report similarly dismal numbers:

Media buyers — the agency people who book campaigns — report that the college social network is a truly terrible target. They’re mainly students, with low disposable income, of course; but, beyond that, the users appear to be too busy leaving messages for eachother to show much interest in advertising. Facebook’s members appear indifferent even to movie advertising aimed at their demographic. Clickthrough rates, the percentage of time users click on an ad, average 0.04% — just 400 clicks in every 1m views — according to one report seen by Valleywag.

From AllFacebook:

Fred Wilson has been updating the world about his venture in Facebook advertising over the past week. Today, Fred posted and updated screenshot of his ad campaign’s performance and it doesn’t appear to be too stellar. For one of his campaigns, out of 10,080 impressions there were only 8 clicks. The average cost-per-click for Fred was $0.08 and the average CPM was $0.06. This is a less than stellar performance. This is nothing new though.

And lastly, from a digital student marketing blog in the UK. This would seem like a natural fit for Facebook’s audience:

Our most recent campaign saw 1.4 million page impressions delivered at specific universities – and only a 0.04% clickthrough rate. Ouch.

Click-through rates seem to sit around 0.04%, which is profoundly lame if you ask me. I’m no online advertising expert–it’s not really our thing–but I’ve run a bunch of Google AdWords and other contextual advertising campaigns. We regularly get click-through rates of 3%, and I gather that’s nothing special.

Here’s my theory on Facebook: it’s a silo. People visit the Fun House of Facebook, and conceptually treat it slightly different than the rest of the web. They’re in Facebook, interacting with friends, playing games, sending messages and now chatting on IM. As such, they’re really unmotivated to leave. Who wants to leave the Fun House?

We’ve seen similar results across Facebook. It’s really difficult to drive visitors out of the app and to your own website.

Friday, May 29th, 2009 analytics, digital, display advertising, marketing, social networks 8 Comments

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.

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Augustine Fou's Opinions, Rants, Raves about Digital

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Notes from the Field: Made Up Words; Digital Jargonisms

web potato – the new couch potato

digital natives – the kids who dont know what newspapers are or what linear TV is

digital immigrants – old(er) ad execs who arrived on the island of digital, praying someone would save them from it help them figure it out

professional malpractice – preaching about digital when you’ve never tweeted or facebooked

obd – obsessive branding disorder

twinterns – interns who were hired to twitter

timeshifting – watching TV at whatever-the-hell-time they want

placeshifting – watching TV at whatever-the-hell-place they want

addressable audience – old(er) ad execs thinking digital gives them more tools to target (address) individual consumers with unwanted ad messages

niche-busters – blockbusters but for smaller (niche) audiences

analog dollars for digital dimes – with the greater efficiency and measurability of advertising in digital mediums, for every dollar taken out of analog mediums, only dimes need to be put back into digital to achieve similar or greater effect

I know I am wasting half of my ad dollars; I just don’t know which half — is more like “I know I am wasting 99% of my ad dollars” (banner ad click through rates are generously at 1%, which means the other 99% is known to be, for sure, wasted — no more guessing necessary).

measured media = TV, print, radio — which equals not really measurable at all

(old) branding – the process of systematically duping customers into buying inferior products by mis-information, dis-information, and lying

(new) branding – consistently delivering on the promise of superior products through rapid, customer-driven innovation

re-intermediation – re-insertion of a digital middleman whose job it is to filter, prioritize, and deliver only what is relevant and timely

click farms – banks of low-wage workers who click google ads to earn a living rather than do farming

Digital Consigliere

Collaborators – Digital Profs

Pages

Favorite Sites

Prototype Web Services

Archives

Augustine Fou's Opinions, Rants, Raves about Digital

promise

Share this:

Source: http://community.microsoftadvertising.com/blogs/analytics/archive/2009/07/06/getting-back-to-basics-why-web-advertising-needs-traditional-media-metrics.aspx

Getting Back to Basics – Why Web Advertising Needs Traditional Media Metrics

posted Mon, Jul 06 2009

by Young Bean Song MSFT

Trying to build a brand marketing campaign without traditional target reach and Gross Rating Points (GRP) estimates is like trying to diet without the concept of calories. The analogy of dieting and advertising works on many levels.

My response…

A “brand” is earned over time. “Branding” is no longer a useful activity (and furthermore it is damned expensive — media costs — and ineffective — because it is the advertiser making claims that modern consumers don’t believe, assuming they saw the ad in the first place).

From AdAge — people buying private label, generics, or store brands (quality of which are pretty comparable to name brands)

Private Labels winning the battle of the brands http://adage.com/article?article_id=134791

Share this:

web potato – the new couch potato

digital natives – the kids who dont know what newspapers are or what linear TV is

digital immigrants – old(er) ad execs who arrived on the island of digital, praying someone would save them from it help them figure it out

professional malpractice – preaching about digital when you’ve never tweeted or facebooked

obd – obsessive branding disorder

twinterns – interns who were hired to twitter

timeshifting – watching TV at whatever-the-hell-time they want

placeshifting – watching TV at whatever-the-hell-place they want

addressable audience – old(er) ad execs thinking digital gives them more tools to target (address) individual consumers with unwanted ad messages

niche-busters – blockbusters but for smaller (niche) audiences

analog dollars for digital dimes – with the greater efficiency and measurability of advertising in digital mediums, for every dollar taken out of analog mediums, only dimes need to be put back into digital to achieve similar or greater effect

I know I am wasting half of my ad dollars; I just don’t know which half — is more like “I know I am wasting 99% of my ad dollars” (banner ad click through rates are generously at 1%, which means the other 99% is known to be, for sure, wasted — no more guessing necessary).

measured media = TV, print, radio — which equals not really measurable at all

(old) branding – the process of systematically duping customers into buying inferior products by mis-information, dis-information, and lying

(new) branding – consistently delivering on the promise of superior products through rapid, customer-driven innovation

re-intermediation – re-insertion of a digital middleman whose job it is to filter, prioritize, and deliver only what is relevant and timely

click farms – banks of low-wage workers who click google ads to earn a living rather than do farming

Share this:

Update Jan 2014

Summary

Facebook click-through rates of 0.01 – 0.05% (Facebook CTRs)

Facebook effective CPMs turned out to be $0.01 – $0.19 (Facebook eCPMs)

Facebook average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25 (Facebook CPCs)

Other social media benchmarks from my experiments (Adwords, StumbleUpon, PayPerPost / Izea) can be found here.

Comparison of click-through rates for search ads versus display ads

As a scientist, I like to run experiments. And I like to make stuff. So my team and I made a few Facebook apps that solved needs that we had (a few samples listed below) and shared them publicly on Facebook to see if they were also useful to other people too.

I beta tested some apps with a few friends by inviting them directly. Then to get it out to a larger number of people, we decided to try Facebook advertising, the much-hyped, holy grail of display advertising on one of the largest and most active social networks.

– visual discovery, share, and queue management interface for Netflix

– visual discovery and sampling interface for music (Amazon backend)

– create and send photo or video e-cards by drag and drop (Flickr and YouTube backend)

– visual display of your friends (closest ones have the most recent status updates)

– social commerce – I’ll buy what he bought; things I have, things I want

Ideas for Facebook

In the spirit of openness, as an advertiser who wants to continue using Facebook advertising, perhaps there are a few things they can do to improve the effectiveness of Facebook display ads.

Earth to Facebook… anyone listening?

Revision 6/30/2009: Facebook Click Fraud

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/26/facebook-click-fraud-101/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/21/facebook-admit-click-fraud-problem-says-fix-coming-today/

Despite click fraud, the click through rates are still incredibly low. So if you subtract all the click fraud, is ANY advertiser making ANY money from facebook advertising?

Share this:

Digital Consigliere

Collaborators – Digital Profs

Pages

Tags

Favorite Sites

Prototype Web Services

Archives

Private Labels winning the battle of the brands
http://adage.com/article?article_id=134791