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Feb 17, 2015 8:00:00 AM

How To Solve The Biggest Problems With Facebook Advertising

Until recently, one of the biggest frustrations with Facebookadvertising has been the inabilityfor advertisers to effectively measure the ROI ofadvertising campaigns. In fact, brands have been crying out for data to help them measure campaigns and justify their ad spend for years.

Late last year, Facebook answered those cries withthe launch of theiradvertising platform, Atlas, which was designed to improve how marketers target and measure their online advertisements.

Advertisers are excited about the potential of Atlas, as it opens up two new and extremely powerful capabilities for digital advertisers: a solution to the ‘cookie problem; and the ability to target consumers on mobile devices.

Let’s look at these two possibilities in a little more detail:

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Jan 22, 2015 8:00:00 AM

5 Critical Signs You Need Help With Your Facebook Advertising Campaign

Are your Facebook advertising campaigns producing the ROI you want? If not it’s time to look at your advertising strategy. Some companies are rewarded with low-cost leads and healthy profits from their Facebook campaigns, while others simply fail.

There are some common mistakes made by facebook advertisers that are preventingthem from getting the results they want. Consider these five points before embarking on your next campaign:

1. Not having a Goal

When you create a Facebook ad, the first thing to ascertain is what your objective is.
Each Facebook ad should have a specific, measurable goal, and you need to know what metrics you will use to measure your success with that goal.

By focusing on “cost per” metrics, you can improve the effectiveness of you campaign without increasing the ad spend.

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Jan 13, 2015 9:24:00 AM

5 Horrible Mistakes You're Making With Facebook Advertising

Facebook can be a powerful way to target potential and current customers, track the ROI of your campaigns down to the penny, and grow your business’ influence. Despite this, brands are making the same few mistakes over and over again when it comes to their Facebook advertising.

Here are five of the most common reasons campaigns fail and how to avoid them.

1. Poor targeting

There is no excuse for poor targeting, as Facebook makes it easy to narrow down your target audience by age, gender and interests, so you can literally tailor your promotion to only reach those who are actually interested in what you have to offer.

2. You’re not noticeable

Your advert is one of hundreds of messages on the viewer’s screen and they will skim over most of the content until something catches their attention. You therefore need to make sure that it’s your advert they’re looking at.Your ad needs a clear image under an attention-grabbing headline,accompanied by engaging copy. Keep the copy short so Facebook doesn’t truncate it, and use a relevant image that is noticeable in the mini right-hand images.

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Dec 30, 2014 8:00:00 AM

Facebook Relaunches Cross Network Ad Platform Atlas

Advertisers' fascination with cookies has long past. Every advertiser knows deep down that a cookie is a blunt instrument and its limitations are woefully apparent when dealing with cross-channel campaigns. Unfortunately, cookies are the best way to track the effectiveness of online campaigns. That is, until Facebook announced the relaunch of their cross-network ad platform, Atlas.

With Atlas, Facebook are attempting to take on Google on its home turf — display advertising. How? Aside from dispensing with cookies, Atlas purports to bridge the gap between the offline and online advertising worlds by linking the real-world interactions of customers to their Facebook profiles.

Here’s how it works. When a user logs in to Facebook or uses their Facebook credentials to log in to other websites, the network installs cookies to track their activities on the website. But cookies alone are not effective enough, and they don't work on mobile, which is becoming the preferred online shopping platform for consumers. To navigate the problem, Atlas combines cookies with demographic information to help advertiser’sbetter target their audience.

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Oct 7, 2014 7:30:00 AM

Facebook Advertising: 10 Top Tips To Nail Your Next Campaign

Ignore the gurus - advertising is deceptively simple. It’s about creating the right messages and putting it in front of the right people. But there’s a knack to enjoying effective Facebook advertisingFirst, why target Facebook advertising? Well, it’s the third most popular website in the world (after Google and YouTube), which makes Facebook advertising extremely powerful for businesses.

With this social media platform, we’re talking about well over 1 billion users – that’s a lot of potential leads. But while the concept of advertising is straightforward, here are 10 top tips to make sure your digital messages cut through the clutter.

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Sep 4, 2014 10:30:00 AM

Instagram Introduces New Analytics Tools

If you thought Instagram was just a photo sharing app, think again. The Facebook-owned social media network, which now boasts more than 75,000,000 daily users,has evolved into a powerful marketing tool and advertising platform

Instagram has rolled out the tools to its current advertising partners, including BananaRepublic, Adidas and Michael Kors, whose striking visual adsperfectly fit the aesthetic that Instagramare striving for. The response from advertisers has been positive; Michael Kors gained 33,000 new followers in the wake of theirInstagram ad campaign (16 times more than usual),but feedback has shown that companieswant more insight into how their ads are performing and how people are engaging with theircontent.

In response to feedback, Instagram haslaunched three new marketing analytics tools, which will enable marketers to monitor how their posts are performing in real time, using detailed measurementsThe "Account Insights" tooltracks impressions, reach and engagement for a brand's unpaid posts.It also aggregates stats about an account's follower base, with demographic information such as the age and gender of users. It will also advise on the best times of day or week to post, based on user’s activity.

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Jul 9, 2014 10:30:00 AM

Advertising Spend Trends On Facebook, Twitter and YouTube

Although brands are increasing their spend on social media advertising, only a relatively small portion of it is going to ads - according to a new survey of Ad Age readers.  

Ad Age and RBC Capital Markets jointly conducted their fifth major survey of marketer attitudes toward social media and the survey polled 1,682 executives at marketing, agency and media companies for their opinions on FacebookTwitter and YouTube (which was included for the first time).

It seems that marketing teams are spending slightly more in digital and social media channels than in previous years, but this spend is still a relatively small part of overall advertising budgets. So what’s the thinking behind it?

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Jul 7, 2014 10:30:00 AM

Developing Countries Want To Advertise On Facebook

As Facebook’s lead ad planner, Kelly Maclean’s job is to watch people watch advertisements. In emerging markets, the heat is on to study local activity so that Facebook can come up with advertising methods that perform well in developing countries. She travels to places like Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa to get an inside look at what works and what doesn’t.

So what’s the main difference between Facebook advertising in places like this and countries in Europe and the US? In the US it’s fair to say that social media advertising is rife, to the point where it can sometimes get in the way of ‘socializing’, or it becomes a bit of an intrusion on your digital world. It’s a cluttered marketplace where brands battle for their piece of the action, but it’s a very different story in the developing World where it’s still a novelty to see and hear what big brands have to say. MacLean said:

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Jul 1, 2014 10:30:00 AM

Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising is an exciting marketing platform, now more than ever. The medium is constantly in development and 2013 saw massive changes and growth, with new features, targeting options, and channels to explore. But 2014 is proving to be even bigger.

Twitter

Twitter had a big year in 2013. Perhaps most importantly, Twitter filed for and successfully completed their IPO (Initial Public Offering) and floated on the New York Stock Exchange.

Throughout 2013 and leading up to the IPO Twitter successfully overhauled the advertising interface and targeting functionality, launched TV ad targeting and created the impressive Lead Generation Cards. Now we have Tailored Audiences (remarketing) and a true 'broad match' for keyword targeting.

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Jun 12, 2014 10:30:00 AM

4 Performance Tweaks for Facebook Advertising

As one of the largest and most influential ad networks on the planet, Facebook ads can do a lot for your business. But like any serious Internet marketing campaign, advertising on Facebook is a continuous battle of tweaks and optimization. Fortunately, there are dozens of ways to squeeze every last bit of value out of your ad dollar on Facebook. Below we'll look at four simple performance tweaks anyone can use to improve their Facebook ad campaign in only a few minutes. 

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