Google's ads are better because you have intention when you are searching. That's not true when you are checking into Facebook to see what other people are doing. Are there other times when people use Facebook and they have some intent? Planning an event, or asking a question, those come to mind.
Facebook Advertising is Fool's Gold
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Re: Facebook Advertising is Fool's Gold
#22But consider Facebook's "friction-less sharing". Facebook now knows you just listened to a song, read and article, took a trip, had a baby, got married.... Now think of the targeting you can get there.
You sell cars. I listen to Donovan, The Beatles, The Stone Roses, Mozart, Au, REM, Dj Shadow, Handsome Boy Modelling School, Chopin, Ludovico Einaudi and Daft Punk (to name but a few). I've liked pages for five star greek hotels, the burger place on the corner, the guy who sells awesome falafel's on Hoxton market. You know I saw this video of a talking dog that I thought was totally awesome. Just this month, I read a…
Are you sure? Advertisers have been comfortable with finding correlations between unrelated consumer behaviors for decades. I can almost guarantee you that, on average, someone who likes five star Greek hotels is more likely than the average American car buyer to consider a Volvo.
I think a lot of Facebook's value depends on just how useful that personalized information is, and how difficult it will be for a competitor like Google to extract in other ways. My guess is that it will turn out to be pretty useful as advertising campaigns (and brands themselves) become more and more segmented, but also not so hard for traditional cookie-tracking methods to get 80%+ of the same useful information.
Re: Facebook Advertising is Fool's Gold
#23Seems reasonable to me.
Facebook is gathering what amounts to a static picture of each user then selling ads based on the pictures. There really isn't a time component in the data (though perhaps they can add one now that the service has existed for many years).
On the other hand, Google has more or less assembled a bunch of archetypes based on behavior (people who search for X later purchase Y, etc.). Then they match queries to these archetypes. The time component is front-and-center here because the archetype match was prompted by a user action.
A purchase is really a time-related event that transforms the user in some sense. By purchasing something you're changing "who" you are from the perspective of an advertiser (e.g. a Chevy driver could become an Audi driver).
So Facebook has a great picture of "who" each user is at a the moment, but no real way of knowing "who" each user would like to become or when. Hence, perhaps, some of their difficulty in selling ads.
Or not.
Re: Facebook Advertising is Fool's Gold
#24Facebook's advertising model is a simple classical displaying advertising model. It need be disrupted seriously. Nowadays, the most popular marketing model is displaying advertising model, which is actually an attention-driven marketing model. However, no matter how good they are context-awared and personalized, they are always guesswork, which can hardly achieve high relevancy. It is extremely difficult to guess users’ actual intention for most cases, even you may have a lot of information of them. For example, it is super difficult to guess what an individual is exactly looking to buy when he walks into a Trader Joe’s, no matter how much information you obtained on him, like his income, profession, age, education and etc. Users’ intentions are always dynamically changing from time to time. There are no general equations that can perfectly predict people’s intentions. As a result, no matter how perfectly a system can attract attentions, attention-driven marketing can never achieve high efficiency and accuracy.
As a matter of fact, nowadays advertisement industry is the biggest bubble of the world. Every year, trillions of dollars completely wasted by irrelevant advertising unnecessarily. What is even worse is, the user experience is badly hurt by ads and spams. Such marketing system can be called as attention-driven marketing system. Everything is done to attract attentions. However, only a few attentions are really attracted, but majority of the attentions may not be finally turned into intentions. As a result, majority of the marketing costs are totally wasted.
The future marketing systems will be built on intentions. Intention-driven commerce systems need let every user to express his/her intentions freely and help him/her achieve his/her intentions in highly optimized way by socialization and crowd-sourcing. The future world needs to be a world without displaying ads, but only pure relevant information that matches users' intentions dynamically and real-timely. This is the very objective of my current startup project as well.
Re: Facebook Advertising is Fool's Gold
#25Not trying to defend the viability of FB ads here, but this analysis seems a little shallow. Falling within a certain demographic may not "make" you click an ad, but the same could be said of performing a search on Google. If circumstance Y makes one want to buy a product, then as long as falling within demographic X is correlated with being in Y, targeting X could be a good idea. It is (obviously) the reason why toy commercials air during children's shows and not during basketball games.
Re: Facebook Advertising is Fool's Gold
#26You are mistaken to think that the search-engine show-people-what-they-were-searching-for-anyway kind of advertisement is the only kind of advertisement that can work on the internet.
I used to work for Hyves, which was until a year ago or something the biggest social network in the Netherlands. Hyves lost to Facebook in terms of number of users, but something that they did do right was modernization. Hyves had an in-house sales team and studio, which sold custom viral campaigns to cooperate advertisers. These campaigns could usually go together with a TV campaign and/or other media.
For some products search engine advertisement is the right kind of advertisement (parrot secrets, maybe cars, I don't know), for others not such much (food stuffs for example).
Re: Facebook Advertising is Fool's Gold
#27I agree that Google can target alot better IF you have a product that solves a problem people search for. IF.
> What researchers discovered was that people bought milkshakes as a breakfast replacement because it was entertaining during a long, boring commute, and would keep them full until lunch.
How do you advertise for them on Google? If they search for "breakfast replacement for long, boring commute"?
For anyone who can match their product to search queries, Google is the way to go, agreed. But not all products can, because people are not actively looking for solving a problem/need that your product solves.
If I look at my current facebook ads, these are not things I actively search for, e.g. drinks, shavers, parties, facebook games, ... If I had to spend marketing $ on these, I'd probably choose facebook ads over AdWords as well.
Re: Facebook Advertising is Fool's Gold
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adsense makes up a minority of Google's ad profits. The billion dollar business is in Adwords, not Adsense.
Minority? It almost half of all Google ad profits.
It is more like Adwords: 70% Adsense: 30%
http://investor.google.com/earnings/2012/Q1_google_earnings....
Re: Facebook Advertising is Fool's Gold
#29But consider Facebook's "friction-less sharing". Facebook now knows you just listened to a song, read and article, took a trip, had a baby, got married.... Now think of the targeting you can get there.
You sell cars. I listen to Donovan, The Beatles, The Stone Roses, Mozart, Au, REM, Dj Shadow, Handsome Boy Modelling School, Chopin, Ludovico Einaudi and Daft Punk (to name but a few). I've liked pages for five star greek hotels, the burger place on the corner, the guy who sells awesome falafel's on Hoxton market. You know I saw this video of a talking dog that I thought was totally awesome. Just this month, I read a…
You're looking at it from the wrong point of view. The car makers want to sell cars, they don't care who to. Someone who lists their favourite car will see car adverts, whereas you should see adverts for concerts in your region, watching economics documentaries on Netflix, and holidays to major falafal-eating countries.
Well, that is, if Facebook does it properly. And you don't block them.
Re: Facebook Advertising is Fool's Gold
#30But consider Facebook's "friction-less sharing". Facebook now knows you just listened to a song, read and article, took a trip, had a baby, got married.... Now think of the targeting you can get there.
You sell cars. I listen to Donovan, The Beatles, The Stone Roses, Mozart, Au, REM, Dj Shadow, Handsome Boy Modelling School, Chopin, Ludovico Einaudi and Daft Punk (to name but a few). I've liked pages for five star greek hotels, the burger place on the corner, the guy who sells awesome falafel's on Hoxton market. You know I saw this video of a talking dog that I thought was totally awesome. Just this month, I read a…
Car salesmen aren't the only people that want to sell you things though. A music website, a holiday company, a food company or a bookshop now have loads of info that could help target ads at you.
Not that I'm defending Facebook advertising (there's other reasons that I think it's largely pointless, at least from a click-through perspective - the primary one being that if I'm going on a social media site, I'm usually going to be social, not to buy a new car or book a holiday), but the fact that one particular market can't necessarily target one particular user doesn't seem to be a great argument against it.