Top 5 features of Facebook’s mobile advertising platform

Posted on by John Flynn - CEO - Copley Advertising

Gary Vee is in front of a crowd and again says.  “Facebook is one of the best B to B tools out there. If you are not doing Facebook dark posts then you are losing out.”

He’s right.

Right now Facebook is an incredible value.  $6 CPM is a steal based on the platform’s capabilities.  Every month Facebook rolls out new features and updates.  It’s an embarrassment of riches.  Here are the top five features that make Facebook’s Mobile DSP Platform a great fit for B to B mobile advertising.

Self-Optimizing – I am a big fan of granular reporting.  Most of the time I like to get my hands dirty and pick which apps are performing, tracking operating system click rate, creative A/B testing and many other benchmarks.  Facebook’s self-optimization will choose which demographic features (age, sex, placement) is working and move your impressions to ensure a lower cost per click.  And Facebook does a very good job.  They will even notify you if they think a change in targeting is needed to further optimize your program.

Video Ads – You can upload your video ads to the Facebook platform in seconds and begin your video campaign.  I use my YouTube videos and never had an issue.  When the campaign starts Facebook will log in views, how long the views are and the price per view which is usually pennies.  Why is Facebook doing this?  YouTube.  Facebook wants YouTube out and is replacing it with its own video platform.  The engagement rate using video ads is huge.   Video ads are taking over mobile.  It’s another differentiator from other advertising.  The fact that Facebook recognizes this and makes life easy is huge.

Dark Posts – One of my favorite phrases in media…Facebook Dark Posts.  In reality, it’s easy to do.  The point of dark posts is that the ad is not posted to your “page” when published. An example is my business page is Copley Advertising.  I use my platform to post ads for clients all the time.  I don’t want every client’s ad on my newsfeed.  Dark Posts helps solves the problem.  Plus it seems the click rate is very good on average.

Targeting – Facebook has great targeting.  You can target by street address, hobbies, last time you traveled, what newspaper your demo likes,  job title, company employed by, Facebook groups, pages you follow, income and on and on.  Pretty impressive.  Plus setting up different Ad Sets for each test is easy.  With Split Testing you can increase your optimization and Facebook will reward you with a cheaper CPM.

Ease of Use – Facebook has made the platform very easy to set up with little or no knowledge of code.  The ad manager is great for the majority and the Power Editor allows the user to take a deeper look at the campaign and offers more tools to play with. There is no reason why you can’t have your first Facebook ad up in minutes.

So why is Facebook doing this?  Easy.  Money.  They are proving that they are a serious B to B DSP mobile platform.  They are looking to attract big companies and agencies to hop on the program.  Facebook is a great mobile platform for B to B advertising.  Use it now because late 2017 it is going to cost you a lot more.

Adwords vs Mobile Geofencing

Posted on by John Flynn - CEO - Copley Advertising

Over the last four years, I have explained to over 1,000 clients the difference between Adwords and Mobile Geofencing.

Adwords is a great tool and now has the ability to geotarget a location and place ads in mobile apps. Adwords has made a strong splash in mobile marketing.

One of the issues Adwords has is that it needs a lot happen in order for the mobile impressions to be delivered to the correct demographic in the right geotarget. A trained Adwords agency can pull all the right levers and make this happen but there’s a small room for error. One error and impressions can be delivered to a location thousands of miles from the target.  The feedback can take days and Adwords doesn’t report in real time.

Google is always changing their algorithms and one day a cost per click may be $1.00 then it is $2.00 then back to $.80. A dedicated Adwords agency can manually track and change the cost per click on at least a daily basis to ensure your total pay-per-click rate is reasonable.

Mobile geofencing is clean. The geofence is set around a location (lat-long). Then tags all the Smartphones in that location. A filter can be put in place to target the desired demographic (age and gender) or behavior.   There is a 1% chance of the wrong demographic seeing your ad. When the tagged user leaves the geofence they will continue to see the ad and their phone IDs will be placed in a retargeting folder for future campaigns.  Mobile campaigns can change locations, creative and goals in 24 hours.

The big differences between Adwords and Mobile Geofencing boil down to that mobile geofencing has:

Robust Retargeting – the ability to capture an ID of a targeted user that clicked on the creative or saw the ad (impression) and then retarget the user after they leave the geofence.

Real-time – You can track a program in real-time and check on the click rate.  If the click has gone dangerously low you can make changes or shut the campaign off and reaccess.

Behavior Overlays – Target by age, gender, hobbies, type of car you own, shopping preferences and many others.  When you download an app you are giving permission for that company to download a tremendous amount of your personal information. So basically your are opting into a mobile program.

The mobile world is running fast.  And (I’m not kidding) new abilities are happening almost weekly.  So if you are big Adwords user you are in good hands.  But you may want to set some money aside and start a few mobile geofencing.

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John Flynn is CEO of Copley Advertising. He has been seen in Forbes, Business Insider, Slate and other publications.  Copley Advertising uses programmatic buying, retargeting and optimization (app click, time of engagement, operating system whitelist). To learn more about geofencing please email: [email protected] or call (617) 651-2249.