111–120 of 267 posts
The better educated you are, the more likely you won't consider GM to begin with . (purely a guess based on anecdotal evidence ... the only guy I know with a Cadillac STS was a guy who only has high school and was a well-compensated salesman; but even he is now driving Audis)
That's based pretty heavily on your personal social circle, I suspect. It doesn't match with mine at all.
Facebook's root problem is intent. Users who are googling something and seeing AdWords ads are looking for something and often the thing they're looking for shows up as an ad so they - suprise! - click the ad and often become a conversion once on the site. With Facebook there is zero helpful intent. The only intent when you're on Facebook is to use Facebook. And if you do click an ad, you're less likely to become a c…
> With Facebook there is zero helpful intent. The only intent when you're on Facebook is to use Facebook. It isn't about intent - it is about interest. > And if you do click an ad, you're less likely to become a conversion because your intent is still to get back to Facebook as soon as possible and see the rest of Dave's party photos or whatever. Not necessarily. I'm working with a customer right now where I have a 2…
Go watching a movie are such an ingrained part of life for many people and thus we are always "on the look" for a good movie to go watch.
But try and do that with a car brand or any other non-commodity and intent suddently becomes the most important factor.
Search can broadly be broken up into at least two categories:
1. Navigational eg typing "b and h" into the browser; and
2. Informational eg "cheap flights to jamaica".
I don't know what the make up is of (1) vs (2) but I expect for normal users (1) is pretty huge. I would guess that ads are have lower clickthroughs for (1) than (2).
(2) is where you have the intent. The user obviously wants something. They may find it with an ad. They may find it with organic search results. Either way, the goal with search is to get the user the best result.
With Facebook you tend to be just looking at friends' updates, posting your own updates, posting photos and the like. You don't go to Facebook to find things. So it doesn't really matter how much targeting information Facebook has if you don't have that intent.
Many will say "but what if you do start going to Facebook to find things". That's a massive "what if". What if the Sun expands tomorrow and swallows the Earth?
Facebook has (IMHO) a number of strategic problems:
1. It has no control over mobile. Both Google and Apple have mobile OSs;
2. It has no search engine (which is how it could monetize its user information); and
3. Users of community-driven sites are notoriously fickle. There is nothing preventing Facebook from being the next Myspace when something newer, cooler and hipper comes along and the users move on.
Early founders, employees and investors have obviously done spectacularly well and there's a lot that Facebook has done right (all the more surprising considering the length of time and the age of Zuckerberg). It's also created an engineering environment that attracts and maintains top talent (although we'll see if that last once the stock plateaus, which is simply a matter of time). But would I be buying in the IPO? Not a chance in hell.
This isn't about predicting imminent doom. Facebook will be around for years to come. It's about the upside reward vs the downside risk. Facebook somehow is still considered a "growth" company and values as such (with extraordinary P/Es). This will at some point change (as it did for Google some ~5 years ago).
It really depends on what you are trying to sell. It's pretty obvious that car ads would work better on Google: when you are in the market for a new car, you'll definitely google review sites. A perfect hint to start showing car ads. I don't think Facebook has the data yet to detect that you are about to buy a car. If you start liking car reviews, maybe, but that's not a typical behavior. For other products (especial…
> I don't think Facebook has the data yet to detect that you are about to buy a car. If you start liking car reviews, maybe, but that's not a typical behavior. I think they have the data, but maybe not the means to mine it. I'm guessing that people are interested in buying a new car at important life milestones and when replacing an older vehicle. It's pretty easy to find those milestones ("here's pictures of our new…
With a click-through rate of about 0.051% on Facebook ads [1], I'm not too surprised by this. They also made some changes over the past month to their ad payments, in particular removing the option to manually set your CPM (which is the only option to pay to promote your fan page - it's CPC for an external site). So put together a poor CTR and losing some control over how much you're spending, and this is what happen…
That's not true, you can do either CPC or CPM for any kind of facebook ad; what they did do is replace the CPM functionality (which btw, is still available if you use a third party ad tool with facebook) with an "optimized CPM" which auto-bids for you according to what results you want to get.
You can still set a manual max bid though :)
I've actually been interested in a handful of things I've seen as Facebook ads. They are generally things that I didn't know existed, wasn't actively shopping for, and sure as heck wasn't searching for. Example: http://www.mushroomnetworks.com If anyone is going to get any sort of value out of the wealth of information I've given away about myself, it's going to be the person who opens my eyes to something new and aw…
I'm not likely to see an ad for a GM product and immediately run out and buy one (and I'm guessing this is true for 99% of Facebook users). But I have seen ads, and posts by friends, for random products in the $10-$500 range related to things I didn't necessarily need (or know existed), that HAVE influenced my purchasing decisions.
Facebook is a new and different advertising channel, much like Google and Internet ads were before it, and companies and agencies need to adapt accordingly to this.
If you've been around long enough, you might remember stories from the late 90's from companies that both swore by, and swore off, Internet advertising...
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That is insane. Only a bloated bohemoth could manage to spend $30 million on its Facebook-focused HR people. I admit I've never worked at GM, so if someone can tell me why I'm wrong, please do.
You never worked with advertising. Advertising agency doesn't sell you a great campaign, idea or pretty pictures. they sell you media. with a HUGE markup. 10mil media can cost way more than 30mil if bought from an agency creating the 'creatives' (in the case of car ads, a picture of the car, or a movie of it cruising on a road where the art director likes to take vacations) 30mil for 10mil of media, GM had a good dea…
The agencies don't get the markup the media buying companies do. They are to the advertising industry what realtors are to the housing market.
Most of the houses have no idea what they are doing, which only works because their clients are even more clueless.
It will change within the next 5 years and the media buying houses will be mostly gone with a few exceptions.
Its obvious that Facebook ads don't work. How often you see a relevant Ad in Facebook? Almost never. So, advertisers show interesting images, but when you click on that image, it is some non-sense website. Facebook has some private information about the user, other than that FB has no clue what is my mood or what I am looking for. Its no wonder GM pulled out of Facebook.
Most of my ads are software companies like Asana advertising jobs. Seems well-targeted to me.
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> When watching TV the intent is to watch TV, not purchase soap, a car, or a soft drink. The difference being that facebook doesn't make you watch a 10 second ad between each one of Dave's party photos.
Clearly this is where they're failing.. should also inject pre/post roll ads on all videos