The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

If you run ads on Google or MSN, chances are, many of your ad impressions happen on MySpace and Facebook. In terms of total volume of text and banner ad impressions, these social networks are the world's largest Web sites, and MySpace and Facebook have exclusive ad network deals with Google and Microsoft, respectively. But in addition to the content-match inventory on those sites that you can access through major search engines, MySpace and Facebook have proprietary, bid-based, CPC advertising platforms.

How Do Social Networks Differ From Search Engines for Buying CPC Ads?

On search engines' content networks, your ad targeting is based on a match between your keywords (often the same keywords you use for your search ads,) and the text on the page where your ads appear. The technical term for this is contextual targeting. On social networks, instead of using contextual targeting, your CPC ads are targeted based on data in users' profiles. This information can include, age, gender, location, education level, college or alma mater, marital/relationship status, parental status, sexual orientation, employer, interests and hobbies, and exact birthday. This information does not necessarily appear on the same page where your ad appears. For example, when I am logged in to Facebook and I'm reading a message from my friend about his recent trip to Alaska, I still see ads targeted to my profile’s attributes (my age, gender, location, interests,) not ads about vacations in Alaska.

Aside from those differences, social networks are quite similar to search engines' content networks. They are auction-based CPC platforms. You enter an ad, some targeting parameters, a maximum CPC bid, and a budget, and the social networks take care of the rest. 

However, because the social network advertising platforms are new, don't expect the breadth of features and conveniences available in AdWords. It can take considerably more work to manage your CPC ads on these newcomer platforms.

Should You Advertise Directly On a Social Network?

Before you begin advertising directly on a social network’s platform, you should determine if you can describe your target audience in terms of the targeting parameters available. If you are a plumber, you might be better off staying with the search engines, because nothing in someone's social network profile is going to tell you that they have a clogged drain at the moment (whereas, people with clogged drains tend to search for "plumbers" on Google, or read articles online about un-clogging drains.) However, if you are selling New York Giants’ jerseys, you have the ability to target your ads to Giants fans that live in the New York area. If you are selling college counseling services in Indianapolis, you can target local high school students ages 15-18. If you are promoting a touring musician, you can target fans of that musician across the country. As long as you are able to describe your audience in these terms, advertising on a social network will work for you.

How To set Up Your Social Network Ads

There's a very simple rule to succeed with CPC on social networks: Take advantage of all the targeting options, not just one or two. If you try to put out an ad with broad, sweeping targeting criteria, like “everyone under 18 in New York,” or “all men who have a college education and like Football,” you're going to have poor click-through rates, and your ads will stop getting impressions. You, as an advertiser know your audience(s) well. Try to identify as many sub-groups as possible using the available options, and create different ads for each sub-group. For example, if you are a chiropractor with offices in Dallas, you might want to create ten different ads targeted to men aged 25-55 in Dallas, each targeted to interest in one of ten different sports, with ad copy like "Nagging Football Injury - see a chiropractor," "Nagging Basketball Injury - see a chiropractor,” and so on, for soccer, hockey, baseball, tennis, etc…

Targeting Britney Spears fans, 25 years or older on Facebook

How To Measure the Performance of Your Social Network Ads

You should evaluate your media buys on social networks alongside your search engine buys. Invest more of your budget into whichever channel is giving you the highest conversions for your money.

Like the major search engines, MySpace has their own conversion tracking technology.  However, Facebook does not. This means that in order to track conversions on Facebook, you'll need to have access to some other system, such as Google Analytics.  Some advertisers have these tools, but many do not. So do not run CPC ads on social networks if you are not measuring conversions!

In general, you can expect high conversion rates with targeted social network CPC ads, because only your target audience is seeing your ads. And, if some particular micro-targeted segment of your assumed audience performs poorly, you can adjust your bidding for that segment – and in the process you'll probably learn something about who your core audience really is.

Ehren Reilly, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.



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