Fun Ways to Improve Facebook Ad CTRs

Driving traffic to your website or Fan page through Facebook advertising is becoming a popular trend these days. And for good reason too! Facebook is easily capable of sending you thousands of highly targeted visitors! But with all of the advertising Facebook users are subjected to, what can you do to make your ad stick out? Traditionally, Facebook ad click-through rates (CTRs) are pretty horrible. From my research I’ve seen that an average performing ad will have about a 0.02% CTR. A few weeks ago when I had decided that I wanted to use Facebook ads to drive awareness to a contest I was running called RavenHunt , I found my ads falling into that average category (or worse!). I had setup these two ads: The “Play RavenHunt and Win!” ad had a CTR of 0.017%, and the “Win a Free FlipHD Camera!” advertisement’s CTR was higher at 0.022%. Not bad CTRs by Facebook standards, but I wanted something more. So I asked myself, “Self, if you were the target audience for these ads and were putzing around on Facebook – what would make you click on an ad?” What I wasn’t considering was that my target audience (Internet Marketers) are used to these types of ads. In fact, they are the type of people who create ads just like these. So that’s when I decided to get silly. People love to laugh, and it was my theory that if you had a funny enough ad you’d be able to increase your CTRs. Additionally, I knew that I needed images that naturally drew a person’s attention to them. I needed kittens and puppies. And that’s when I created these two ads that doubled my CTRs: The “Puppies Are Awesome” ad had a CTR of 0.04% and the “This is a cat.” ad was just shy of that at “0.039%”. So by adding some fun to my Facebook ads, my CTRs increased. That got me thinking again – is there a way to combine the two approaches and still maintain a higher CTR? And that’s when I created the ad, “A Game for SEOs by SEOs”: This ad had a 0.06% CTR and didn’t go overboard on the silliness. Instead, it spoke to it’s target audience more appropriately, and still had a less than standard headline. It just goes to show that with the right creativity and the right amount of effort, you can make significant differences to your Facebook ad campaigns. Now if only I can get that number up to 0.1%. Stay tuned. Taylor Pratt is the Product Marketing Manager at Raven Internet Marketing Tools . With Raven you can conduct research and analysis, manage link building campaigns, track search engine trends, instantly produce ROI reports for SEO and SMM campaigns, and collaborate with team members with intuitive multi-user features. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Fun Ways to Improve Facebook Ad

Omniture Now Offers Enhanced Facebook Marketing Analytics

With the ever emerging and evolving world of web 2.0. marketers no more can afford to neglect social media, and with Facebook becoming the second most visited website online after Google … and THE INTERNET (thinking back AOL circa 1998) to the bulk of its users … analytical tracking and gauging user action, interest and return on investment is crucial to an online marketing campaign. By engaging in social media networking, marketers get an awesome opportunity to join the conversation and have more relevant interactions with their customers. Focusing forces on social media web, a marketer gets a unique chance to: More effectively reach highly targeted and active web users; Better understand the needs and interests of their potential customers; Get instant feedback on new products and offers, etc. Yesterday Omniture , an Adobe company and a leading provider of online business optimization & target marketing software, and Facebook announced that they signed a deal to provide online marketers with solutions to better understand and optimize the impact and ROI of their Facebook investments. The new Omniture feature provided in collaboration with Facebook will enable marketers to automate Facebook ad buying and access analytics to help companies more easily integrate Facebook as a marketing channel in order to connect to and have relevant conversations with Facebook’s more than 400 million active users. For Omniture users this alliance will basically mean the ability to access a single dashboard to plan, deliver and measure campaigns. From one dashboard, the users will be able to: Effectively manage their ad spend on Facebook; Easily compare Facebook ad campaign metrics with other media channels; Generate reports specifically designed to understand ad effectiveness for some of the unique elements of Facebook such as Facebook Pages and applications. Omniture and Facebook will continue to expand this partnership as marketers increasingly utilize this channel to optimize visitor acquisition, conversion and retention. For more information, please contact your Omniture account manager. The official press release can be found here . Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Omniture Now Offers Enhanced Facebook Marketing