socialmediocrity

Facebook recently appears to have introduced “simple” pricing options for it’s advertisers. If you’re familiar with the ads platform, you’ll find the change at the end of the setup page, where you would normally place your bid type and bid value.

Facebook Simple Pricing

Despite having until now always defaulted bidding to “CPC”, in favour of “CPM”, and always default-setting the bid price to the middle of the range suggested, apparently that’s not simple enough and we have this new presumably simpler option.

What appears to happen when selecting this option is that your bid type is set to CPC, and your bid value is set to the middle of the suggested range – in essence it simply accepts, but hides, the default values it had originally provided.

What is not clear is whether the bid will change with the estimate. As any long term advertisers will have found out by now, whilst CPC bidding can provide lower risk in terms of the cost of the traffic it generates, it can fluctuate wildly as far as volume is concerned – and this is certainly in part due to the optimisation of delivery based on effective-CPM rates, and in part due to quality scoring. Facebook’s own revenues increase substantially if they can increase the CPM rates of the inventory available, so anything that increases CPM rates makes great commercial sense

But I’m not convinced it will. I doubt that these “simple” bids will be automatically changed after setting – that would surely require a significant change in advertising terms, and something that a former advertiser would have to actively accept rather than by implication. If anything this makes the buying of advertising  even less daunting to the first-time advertiser, and theoretically may lead to a drop in the quality of the ads being ordered – this based on the blunt assumption that the professionals will normally produce better “quality” ads.

In fact, it may lead to a high turnover of poorly-performing ads as advertisers continue to try out the platform for themselves. How many CPC ads, with bids set to the default setting are still running and receiving substantial volume of impressions, say, 7 days after starting.

Perhaps the belief is that with CPCs effectively being set by Facebook (or at least by their suggestions), they will self-perpetuate an increase. After all, if lots of advertisers start targeting the same audience with an auction-based CPC inventory, and start competing aggressively for each click, there will be an enormous rise in revenues, vis-a-vis Google. Which is true when you have single-vertical advertisers competing for a finite resource, but there is nothing scarce about inventory on Facebook.

It is possible that with a larger number of advertisers, and provided enough get their advertising and targeting right, then eCPMs start to climb rapidly. As long as enough advertisers are getting above average CTRs from their ads, this will begin to raise the foor-rate for CPMs as this will be determined by an average CPC bid (Facebook’s default), but factored by an above average CTR, leading to much higher inventory rates. But I am not sure that the link to “simple” pricing options is any more simple than the default settings provided.

There is undoubtedly more to come from this initial link, and given the potential impact on FB’s revenues, it will be interesting to see what measures it takes that in turn support the sites CPM rates in future.

I’ve been scratching my head a bit about Google Buzz. I have to admit I got as excited as the next overly-excitable social media dood about it’s launch and announcement, but really all it did is made me realise how few of my contacts / friends / nodes-in-my-network actually use google mail still.

Still, I’m sure (as I am sure about Wave) that it’s purpose or killer application will eventually emerge to finally hail the end of Bebo, MySpace and / or (dare I say it?) Orkut (what will become of Orkut these days?).

Imagine my surprise then when I recently viewed some clips on (5yrs old today) YouTube, which I liked so much I wanted to share them, only to find the distinct lack of a “Buzz” share option. With recent announcements of live-streaming and long-form content being available on the worlds favourite video platform, I would have expected a more immediate integration. I start to “get” Buzz if I’m sat in front of the World Cup, buzzing away at disastrous refereeing decisions, the need for technology and attractive female Scandinavian supporters with painted-on football jerseys. But if I can’t do that then isn’t it just a bit like everything else I barely find time to contribute to, let alone read.

Perhaps the people at Google are merely human afterall – and that integration, even for them, is still something you’ll get round to after you’ve tidied your room, and called your mum, wife and sister.

What James Dyson can think up, Network Rail can break.

It appears that Facebook have changed the end dates / times for campaigns running, and at the moment this could cause a problem for existing campaigns.

If your campaigns have an end date set, check what time the campaign is scheduled to end on that date. It appears as though the default has shifted from midnight on that date (i.e. end of that day) to 00:00 (or the beginning of that day).

It bit me in the backside this morning, although I managed to catch it in time, but unless I missed this change when setting the campaign up some weeks ago, then you may lose a day of your campaign – and if that is the build up to a product launch, or movie release, or similarly orgasmic crescendo to a piece of activity, then it could be the one day you absolutely MUST have your campaign live that you miss.

I noted today, if you will excuse the pun, the manner in which the IAB UK are posting stories from their fan page on Facebook.

Rather than posting articles with links back to their website to read the full story (the sort of thing most people manage with the “share” function), they prefer to post “notes”, which link through to nothing more than a list of notes, inside Facebook, which provide nothing more on the story in question unless you hit the “link to original” footer link in the note.

IAB "note" without linking to the actual story

Confused? I certainly am.

It should be of grave concern that the IAB, the (alleged) guardians of best practice for all things interactive, should be so apparently inept.

I say apparently only because there is a chance that it is a facebook bork, or other such quirk causing it, but in the meantime I shall remain disappointed with them all.

Or have I missed something?

So facebook have removed the thumbs up, thumbs down vote on ads that appear on the right-hand-side (ASUs) – I thinkn they removed that function a few weeks ago – and have replaced them with single, thumbs up “Like” call to action. (see below)

So pushing the “like” button then displays that I like this, and I can only imagine the same ad will appear on my friends’ pages as “Richard likes this”, in a similar way that fan page ads declare the number of friends who are also fans.

What’s intriguing is how many users do we think will legitimately use this function, and what impact does it have on me as a user?

Click-through rates on sites like Facebook have been well-documented to be low, or at least it takes work to get them anything above 0.02%, so theoretically you would think that adding distractions would only serve to reduce this further.

There is of course a risk here too, insofar as larger advertisers could benefit from paid-for gaming of this particular system. Find a couple of hundred unrelated users to “like” your ad, even if you have to pay them, and the returns could be huge if higher CTRs are the result of friend recommendations of this type.

Of course, the initial reaction of user will be interesting as it is not clear how I stadn to benefit by “liking” certain ads, and if anything I was always more inclined to give a thumbs down to ads I didn’t want to see again, but it is not clear that this will influence the type of ad I might see again in the future. I for one would not have “liked” the first ad in the example here: it is poorly targeted in the first place, and breaches Facebook’s own guidelines. But equally I don’t want my ad space to be inundated with ads for just a small selection of products either, based on the few things I might want to see more of.

It seems it is another attempt to introduce some subjective quality scoring to the ad serving algorithm (if there is one), but I for one struggle to understand what is wrong with CTR as a measure of the quality of the ad – surely if people “like” the ads they see, then they might click on them, and that seems like a fairly robust measure for whether the ad itself has been effective in soliciting a response. For sure CTR can never be the only measure used, but for these purposes it would seem like a fairly useful one.

Havign just watched the Navy Pilot advert during a break in the Ashes coverage, we collectively decided to see if we “had what it takes”. Bizarrely it seemed, the TV ad gave not a URL to take the test, but instead invited us to search for “NAVY PILOT”.

So either Google has gone bad, or the (no doubt expensive) planning and buying agency concerned with this “integrated, media neutral” campaign have messed up. A search for Navy Pilot from the UK gives a list of natural results, none of which direct me to the test in question, and not a single paid-for placement to be seen.

No doubt there will be a few red faced agency people as a result – but then again they’ll probably post-rationalise it. The real test here appears to be whether you can find the test in the first place, rather than your ability in the game itself.

Following what is probably the most sensational, or at least most expensive week in football transfer history, you’re unlikely to have escaped the fact that Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo have both moved to Real Madrid.

With Kaka’s fee at an estimated £56m , Ronaldo’s a reported £80m many have been wondering where the money is coming from. Real Madrid have a reported 300m euro transfer kitty this year alone. And the rationale for the excessive spending all seems to boil down to shirt sales. As if those million fans that bought the Beckham shirt are going to chuck it in the pile alongside their Zidane shirt, and buy not just a Kaka edition, but also a Ronaldo shirt.

“Ronaldo can be viewed in the same bracket as Beckham when it comes to global commercial impact, if their image is controlled right and Real Madrid improve their results in the UEFA Champions League as a result of their arrival”, said Professor Simon Chadwick, Director of the Center for the International Business of Sport (CIBS) at Coventry University in England.

But a quick look of their respective popularities on Facebook paints an interesting picture. Whilst Kaka looks to be good value, even at £56m, with over half-a-million fans on the social network on a single page, Cristiano Ronaldo barely registers 23,000 on the most popular page for him at the time of writing. And he, of course, cost about £25m more than the half-million-fans Kaka.

If Real’s return on Ronaldo is destined to be in Shirt Sales then they better charge more for them. A lot more.

Facebook have announced the launch of a publicly accessible Vanity url facility – meaning users and Fan Page owners will be able to get themselves a vanity url in the form of www.facebook.com/firstname.lastname, or variations thereof.

A lot of noise is being created about the SEO value in securing yours, although in truth, despite the PageRank, surely Google is smart enough to counter this when their bots come back to report thousands of new urls pointing at strangely similar content? With so many pages pointing out of the domain, the positive PageRank impact will be diluted by several thousand if not millions of links.

What’s more Facebook themselves have taken steps to avoid abuse, such as only being available to pages with 1000 or more fans.

Perhaps the real value of this will be, ironically, in “old” media. How long before we see the first social campaign to incorporate a Facebook vanity url the way we used to see AOL Keyword terms, to drive co-ordinated activity across media? In fact this could be the cutest move Facebook have made so far to drive ad revenue.

Large and fully integrated media agencies don’t seem to “get” the ad opportunities on social environments yet – or at least they’re not particularly great exponents of the environment. But if they can be introduced to it through the medium of familiarity; the subline on a poster, or the closing frame of the TV ad, then perhaps we’ll see more of them understanding how rich an environment it can be when executed properly.

And once they “get it”, Facebook will reap the rewards through advertising dollars.

It appears that some new testing or new ad formats are bing made available on Facebook.

Following the “launch” of Event Ads and Fan Page Ads, and making them available in the ASU position, Facebook appear to have started to run recommendations. Our sources confirm there are currently no plans to make them available as a buyable ad format, although as a format it does become a compelling proposition if the recommendation is for a brand or product as have been developed for user home pages.