Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

I just got a beta invitation to facebooks conversion tracking. We have been clamoring for this for a while and now it’s here.

I literally just opened it up and will be testing it this weekend.

There is a new link in my facebook account, called tracking.

At first glance you fill in a tag name, you make this up, assign a category of the type of conversion, and then give it a value of what it is worth for you.

This generates a code that you paste just above the body tag on your landing page.

Then very simply, every time the page loads, it sends the data to facebook, and they record that as a conversion.

What this means is that you need to send the visitor to a page, after the conversion takes place, where you are going to put the code.

You can also track people through a sales path to figure out where you are losing them.

This paragraph fascinates me from the help PDF.

In your reports, if a converting user clicked on an ad associated with the tracking tag’s advertiser account, the conversion is attributed to the last ad the user clicked; if the convert- ing user never clicked on an associated ad but simply saw an associated ad, the conversion is attributed to the most recent ad the user saw. Note that reports may be delayed up to one day.

The phrase “if the converting user never clicked on an associated ad but simply saw an associated ad, the conversion is attributed….” implies to me that it is not going to track only click throughs which we are used to, but WILL TRACK VIEW- THROUGHS. A view through was first brought up to me by Marcus Frind. That is the concept of the user seeing the ad, but not actually clicking on it, and then googling or typing in your site later. My initial experiments on this without this new tracking did not show a result, but Markus Frind claims it is more significant that click throughs.

(hours later)

This actually is what this tool does. Unbelievable. Just when facebook advertising was getting figured out fairly well by a few of us, the game is on again. These new variables will require a much more sophisticated analysis, but will also allow for much more efficient spending of clicks.

This ties in again with the idea of the ultimate user experience.

It is also interesting that this coincided with facebook tightening up a little bit on some of the advertisers recently.

Lots to learn and lots to test in the upcoming days and weeks.

Stay posted!

This week I have been speaking to a new client who is interested in doing facebook advertising for their large online company. The usual questions come up, and I have been answering them.

In a world of affiliate marketers many companies think, “well we could just turn this over to affiliates and the affiliate can take the financial risk of covering the cost of clicks?”

It might work out, and it might not. Once you (or I in this case) have things going decently financially, the idea of risking large amounts of your capital for the possibility of making sales for another company, may not be that attractive.

A really important concept came up in my discussing ROI for the company. That is the concept of lifetime value of the customer. A good example of this is Travian. Travian is a game you play online where you get to build a village, raise sheep, build armies etc. etc.

When a customer signs up to play Travian I make around 2 bucks. It is free for the customer to sign up. Why in the hell would Travian pay me $2 plus what my affiliate company is getting when Travian doesn’t get a cent when the customer signs up? Well Travian knows that over time the customer will end up buying currency online so they can buy more sheep, or a wall around their town.

In my chiropractic office, the lifetime value of a customer is high, because we take extremely good care of them.

On the other hand if you are selling the customer something for free, but in the process tricking them into an illegal, or unethical monthly rebilling of their credit card then you may still be able to get a good ROI, but only because you are cheating the customer.

I predict that as we mature as a group of people marketing on the internet, and the customer becomes more savvy, we will be able to scam them less and less. (Thank God). This means that the real value will be by creating a lifetime relationship with the customer, and making your money off of them long term. This increases the value of the customer acquisition, and also increases what some of us are willing to pay for clicks. Facebook will dig this, because it increases the cost per click.

One of my biggest goals since going online has simply been a good way to handle e-mail that works.

After years of screwing around with different ideas and set ups, my dream just came true.

My little blackberry 8900, my Mac Air, and my Gmail account are finally talking.

Before today I had to delete the e-mail off of my mac, and then off my blackberry again later.

Yesterday, no joke, I finally got around to deleting the e-mails off of my blackberry, there were over 10,000 of them.

Why don’t I use an i-phone? Can’t type on the thing with one hand. Can’t type without looking. Can’t carry back up batteries with me. Breaks when you sit on it or drop it which I do regularly.

Literally took minutes to set up and now my gmail pulls, pushes, does jumping jacks and the whole bit.

Full on stoked that what I expected back in like 1997 is finally possible easily.

So when do I get my waterproof watch phone I expected back in 1995?

Click the little icon below, download it, and you too can delete e-mails off your entire gmail system while waiting in line at Chipotle.

Just got back from Alice in Wonderland. After Avatar and now this, the bar is way up there. I thought we were going to need holograms at the movies to create this type of reality. No need. Give it another 5 minutes and there will be no more need for actors, our computer screens will be 3D, and the movie will change based on our choices and reactions. Wow. To keep up is requiring us to to be faster and smarter than ever. Just WOW.

Up to now I could only target people living in San Diego and that was it. There were a few official cities in the San Diego area like Poway, that are their own city. But the Beverly Hills of San Diego, La Jolla, was dumped in with Barrio Logan, and San Ysidro, which are not exactly well..uhmm….not exactly the same demographics, and definitely not the same location.

Today facebook came out with vastly more cities.

If you are doing local it allows for vastly more targeting. Initially I believe this will decrease a bit of facebook income. The reason is that if you are marketing say for a local car wash that services a certain part of town, before this you would have had to target the whole town. This was a bit inefficient. But when I got it right, I could often turn it right side up anyways.

Now local marketers will be able to be much more efficient. They will not be showing impressions to users who are 10 miles across town and unlikely to use that local business. Overall I expect this to make the hot local areas like say Miami Beach, or Manhattan more expensive, but for local campaigns in these areas I expect to spend less to reach my converting target market.

Facebook has been experimenting with this for a while, but just rolled out a whole mess of cities. I predict there are probably a good 1,000 new cities added today, but I don’t know for sure.

Here are a couple of examples.

Previously in San Diego if you wanted to target La Jolla, (where my office is), or the part of town next door, Pacific Beach, both of which are neighborhoods but not cities, then you had to market to all of San Diego. Today it became possible to go after the specific neighborhoods.

It also used to be that you could only target Los Angles, which is massive, and now you can target neighborhood in L.A., like my home town Sun Valley (the auto wrecking capital of the world), and North Hollywood the neighborhood next door.

This option will take a while to become valuable. For example when I filled out my Facebook profile, La Jolla was not an option for me, only San Diego. It literally could take years for the majority of people to switch their profile to their local neighborhood instead of their greater city.

Until then I will be running ads both to the neighborhood, which will be more efficient, but smaller campaigns, and to the cities at large to generate larger volume.