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Facebook's News Feed Ads: Now Real-Time Biddable

fbxFacebook will surface News Feed inventory in its six-month-old exchange, creating more visibility and engagement for retargeted ad placements on the site.

Facebook Exchange previously was restricted to ads in the right rail, where response rates are a fraction of what advertisers get in the News Feed. The company's decision to make them biddable in real time (blog post) is a validation for the nascent Facebook Exchange, and suggests FBX has become a significant revenue driver for the company.

Marcus Pratt, director insights and tech at Mediasmith, says the move can only increase the amount advertisers will pay for FBX inventory. He pegs News Feed response rates at 10 to 50 times that of ad placements in the right column.

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Anointed As Facebook Ad Partner, Kenshoo Explores The Value Of Social

After a few months of preparation, digital marketing tech provider Kenshoo unveiled a number of new tools this week as part of its Kenshoo Enterprise 4.7 software upgrade, including integrated organic and paid search reporting. The Israeli company, which has U.S. operations in San Francisco, New York and Chicago, as well as in China and Europe, has bulked up its service offerings, in part, due to its position in Facebook's Preferred Marketing Developer Program.

The use of the preferred developers is designed to make Facebook more user-friendly to advertisers and agencies, as the social network looks to drive revenues more quickly in the face of the heretofore unfamiliar pressures of stockholders.

We spoke with Kenshoo's Zvika Goldstein, the company's Social Product Director, about being a Facebook preferred ad partner, while CMO Aaron Goldman took questions about the company's general focus. (This is the fourth in a series with Facebook Ads API certified PMDs. Earlier: Upcast,  Nanigans and AKQA))

AdExchanger: How are you building/developing the app?

Zvika Goldstein: Within Kenshoo, we have a dedicated business unit for Kenshoo Social. This helps us make sure we have the right resources developing the app with the needs of social marketers in mind. Our product team is always working with clients to set functional requirements and prioritize the roadmap and our R&D team is working on an agile format for quick release cycles. We also stay close with our partners at Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others to understand what they’re seeing and what they’re creating in terms of APIs for developers. We’ve built Kenshoo Social on top of the Kenshoo Universal Platform so that our social solutions integrate with search and all other channels for reporting, tracking and attribution.

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Marketers: Stop Griping About Facebook And Embrace Segmentation

"Social Exchange" is a column focused on the evolving roles of social media in online advertising.

Ed Kats is president of MediaWhiz, a performance marketing and integrated digital media agency. MediaWhiz is part of the Hyper Marketing Inc. network. 

Some marketers love to bash Facebook ads. We saw it in the immediate aftermath of General Motors pulling its $10 million cache of ad buys just days before Facebook’s IPO. We continue to see it as the company’s stock price stumbles.

The truth is, Facebook is finally developing new, exciting ways to deliver real value to online advertisers. It’s time for marketers to recognize that value and get serious about Facebook ads.

In recent weeks, the company has announced a number of prominent changes to its ad platform, including a real-time bidding exchange, mobile-only ads, and a rumored "want" button that would "only work with content identified as relating to a purchasable product."

Facebook also has increased its outreach to the advertising industry. Through various public and private campaigns, it is working to educate marketers about its multitude of ad options and addressing their concerns about the need for more precise data and analytics. At the Cannes Lions festival last month, Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s vice president of global marketing solutions, made the rounds touting the social network’s various ad options.

The key to the success of all of Facebook’s new ad options is segmentation. Segmentation gives marketers the ability to analyze and make real-time media buying decisions based on data available through Facebook’s interface. For agencies, segmentation marks another opportunity to optimize, target deeper and increase conversion rates. The segmentation and retargeting opportunities now exist that will enable Facebook ads to be profitable for brands.

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Too Many Friends, Not Enough Meaningful Connections

"Social Exchange" is a column focused on the evolving roles of social media in online advertising.

Social ExchangeToday's column is written by Andrew Pancer, Chief Operating Officer of Media6Degrees.

Why wasn’t I happier last week when The New York Times (NYT) rolled out Facebook Connect, allowing readers to “connect” through their Facebook accounts? After all, I’m a big believer in the power of social graphs to help publishers drive engagement, attract new readers and build revenue.

With the new Facebook option, NYT readers can see what their "friends" are reading. They can also recommend articles, which are posted to their Facebook profiles.  But so far, it’s been a disappointing experience. As much as I want NYT to succeed (full disclosure: I am a former NYT employee), the strategy, at least in its current iteration, is fundamentally flawed.

The underlying problem is that my Facebook “friends” are a pretty diverse – and rather large – group.  Once I linked my Facebook account to NYT, for example, I was connected to a woman who is my “friend” because we went to the same high school and saw each other at our 25th reunion. She is an avid reader of NYT and she recommends a lot of articles. The problem is that almost none of the articles she recommends are interesting to me.

What I care about – and what resonates with me – are the interests I share with my true friends and close connections. The bottom line is that, like many people, I have “friended” hundreds of people, many of whom are only casual acquaintances at best. Now people I have nothing in common with are populating my NYT home page. And the only real way for this new initiative to have any real relevance would be for me to “de-friend” a lot of them.

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What Marketers Can Learn From The Google-MySpace Ad Deal Failure

"Social Exchange" is a column focused on the evolving roles of social media in online advertising.

Social ExchangeToday's column is written by Andrew Pancer, Chief Operating Officer of Media6Degrees.

When Google and MySpace inked a $900 million dollar search and contextual ad deal back in 2006, many heralded it as the coming of age of social networks and the beginning of a new era in digital advertising.  Fast-forward to the present day and it would be a challenge to find someone who thought the nearly billion dollar agreement wasn’t a complete failure.  MySpace has been in decline almost since the ink dried on the deal’s legal documents, usurped by Facebook and left without an identity.  When the pact runs out in August, the social network will try to find another search partner, but will struggle to find anything near as lucrative again from the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

We’ve had the last four years to dissect why things didn’t work out between the search giant and the then blossoming social network, but ultimately it can be boiled down to a few factors.  First, brands were unwilling to risk being adjacent to inappropriate content, an ongoing problem that is only now starting to be addressed.  Second, search advertising and social networks turned out to be a poor match.  Site visitors were in “social mode” not “research” or “purchasing mode.”  Users came to MySpace to see what their friends were doing, not seek out products or services. A result of this socializing was that the average number of pages viewed per session was typically much higher than a standard publisher site. The likelihood that someone will click on a sponsored link decreases as time spent on site increases. Add to this the fact that finding contextual relevancy based on stated interest turned out to be incredibly difficult.  The end result is a ton of pages with an incredibly low yield per page.

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Do I Like "Like"?

"Social Exchange" is a column focused on the evolving roles of social media in online advertising.

Social ExchangeToday's column is written by Andrew Pancer, Chief Operating Officer of Media6Degrees.

It was inevitable.  Facebook announces a new platform and the emails start flooding in.

“Do I like ‘Like?’” they asked.

As Facebook continues to position social as the default setting for the web, examining ‘Like’ and its potential for digital advertising under the marketing microscope seemed like a worthy endeavor.  And after thinking about its possibilities, just as with Facebook Connect, Facebook’s new Open Graph platform, of which the ‘Like’ feature is a component, has allowed the company to take another important step to help publishers, advertiser, and consumers.  Clicking the ‘Like’ button is only a small part of the story.

Facebook’s new platform reminds me of Google’s early days when the company’s name became synonymous with search, even before they launched AdWords, their true revenue stream.  Like Google’s search engine, Facebook has a huge audience. Even if the “Like” platform is embraced by a small percent of their audience, it will still be used by a large number of people, and more importantly, it will be instrumented on many sites throughout the entire web . This doesn’t solve their monetization issues but goes an incredibly long way towards getting them the data they need to start monetizing the engine.

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The New Publisher Revenue Stream: Data

Social Exchange"Social Exchange" is a column focused on the evolving roles of social media in online advertising.

Today's column is written by Andrew Pancer, Chief Operating Officer of Media6Degrees.

There has been a lot of discussion around Mediaweek’s April 4th article “Web Publishers, Ad Nets at Odds”, where WSJ.com and several other major publishers accuse InterCLICK of falsely claiming to sell their inventory. I don’t want to jump into an already crowded conversation, and I’ve already expressed my thoughts on this subject in an opinion piece I wrote in December, which states my position on how publishers should manage unsold inventory.

But for the publishers that won’t sell their ad inventory to networks, there remains the opportunity to sell your data. It’s as valuable to the networks as your remnant inventory, and selling data alleviates many of your concerns about working with third parties.

Ad networks are focused on performance, and the way they deliver on performance is through data.  Sharing basic anonymous data about a browser (not PII) is more valuable to an ad network than being able to share a transparent site list. "Who a user is is becoming more important than where they are," Mark Zagorski, CRO of Exelate recently told ClickZ. I couldn’t agree more.

Selling data helps publishers in several ways:

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Let’s All Do More With Less

Social Exchange"Social Exchange" is a column focused on the evolving roles of social media in online advertising.

Today's column is written by Andrew Pancer, Chief Operating Officer of Media6Degrees.

Data is one of today’s hottest industry topics, and managing it well will drive the future of online advertising. DSPs, ad networks, exchanges, and publishers are falling over themselves to harness their own and other people’s data and use it in new and interesting ways.

Scott Burke, VP Engineering of Yahoo, recently wrote for AdAge:  “It's not about how much data you have, it's what you do with it.” I could not agree more. The fact that most DSPs provide full-service solutions rather than a true trading-desk solution helps prove my point. If campaign execution was as simple as buying data and adding it to the mix, then there would be little need for full-service providers, regardless of client or agency talent. Intelligent use of data requires a mix of analytical thinkers, technologists, and learning systems that allow campaigns to improve over time based on the data being collected.

For an industry full of the world’s smartest technologists and marketers, we should be focused on doing more with less. Revolutionary targeting technology should be able to deliver significantly higher returns without having to amass ever larger arsenals of data.

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Getting Active With The Social Graph

I Scream Social"Social Exchange" is a column focused on the evolving roles of social media in online advertising.

Today's column is written by Andrew Pancer, Chief Operating Officer of Media6Degrees.

The rise of social tools has given the publishing industry an opportunity to leverage connections to increase traffic and time spent with their core audience, while attracting new readers based on their core audience’s social graph.

Just about every major publisher I can think of has enabled social applications on their sites. Some of the more popular are: Facebook, Twitter, AddThis, StumbleUpon and Digg. Enabling the audience to share, tweet and post content to their newsfeed is an excellent strategy, and one I have encouraged in the past. But most sites stop there, failing to unlock the full potential of the social graph.

Instead of simply placing icons on their website in the hopes that readers will distribute their content, publishers should actively push content and messaging to their readers and their readers’ social graph, both on their web sites and throughout social media. Using Twitter and Facebook Connect, publishers can share with readers what their friends are reading and what they are saying about the content.

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What's Your Deal, Partner?

"Social Exchange" is a new column focused on the evolving roles of social media in online advertising.

Today's column is written by Andrew Pancer, Chief Operating Officer of Media6Degrees.

I Scream SocialAs we head into 2010, privacy and brand safety will continue to remain at the forefront of marketer and consumer concerns. With these issues in mind, our industry made excellent strides last year. For example, Google and Yahoo rolled out preference management solutions. NAI and IAB ran consumer education campaigns serving hundreds of millions of impressions to the general Internet audience. Adsafe and Double Verify emerged to assist marketers and hold publishers and networks to a higher level of accountability. The list goes on.

Social targeting companies have also gained momentum in 2009, as marketers are seeing the tremendous ROI they can deliver. As the newest players on the block, social targeting companies have an opportunity and an obligation to establish best practices and set the standard for respecting consumer privacy while delivering strong results for marketers.

Because social targeting solutions are relatively new, there are still a number of important questions that marketers need to ask to understand the data used to target display ads. Here are a few of those questions:

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