We’ve been working on Facebook pay-per-click campaigns for a number of our clients. It is really easy to get started and target your intended demographic audience and /or groups they might belong to.

If you’re a recruitment company, you might target an industry group, or a large employer (careful though!). Or if you sell bouncy castles or kid’s party planning, you might target Mums’ groups in a particular location, or a ticket sales company might target groups of fans of particular artists. University students could be targeted for backpacking holidays, or fishermen targeted for rods and tackle.

The Facebook opportunity is pretty endless.

Facebook pay per click advertising became a much more viable option for us once conversion tracking was available, and provides an effective method of monitoring your results and tracking sales and enquiries from your Facebook spend. Provided the tracking code is implemented correctly, you’ll now be able to see how effective your campaign is.

A Facebook campaign will not only drive more traffic to your site, but also increase brand awareness which will assist your Google, Yahoo! and Bing search campaign(s) too. Whilst we’re not currently spoiled with the view through conversion tracking to really measure the additional influence, hopefully that will come as Facebook’s advertising platform matures.

Facebook Pay per Click Advertising Basics

1. Create a new profile for your business, just like you would for an individual
2. At the bottom of your new profile page click “Advertising”
3. Create an ad with compelling ad copy and an attention-grabbing image
4. Select your audience by demographic – age range, gender, location and so forth
5. Narrow that audience by selecting relevant groups they belong to
6. Generate the conversion tracking code for sales and enquiries and add it to the ”Thank You” page on your site, just like AdWords.
7. Complete your billing information
8. Set it live once your ad is approved by the Facebook team

We’d recommend starting small, a little toe in the water,  perhaps £5 – £10 per day and scale up after a week if it starts to work effectively.

Ask a question about this:

It’s a subject, like many in the world of marketing, that is completely subjective – it will depend entirely on your business, the market sector, your product, your prices, competitors and a whole host of other things. But there is a common thread with many sites that you may want to consider:

Is your visitor ready to convert?

If you’re selling commodity items like CDs or DVDs, or consumable products, the chances are that your buyer has the budget, their hand on their credit card and may just be looking for the cheapest price. Comparatively easy pickings.

However, for many businesses (for example, those selling services, fashion products, interior design products, expensive jewellery, cars, property etc.), visitors clicking on Google ads are a different proposition; sure, they may have a budget, a desire or a need, but it’s likely that they haven’t quite decided exactly what the solution is.

We’re talking about buying cycles, and their length and the stages in them vary significantly for every business.

Let’s use the example of buying a fashion handbag. I’m not talking about a £20 bag from a supermarket, I mean several hundred pounds on a designer bag.

There will be a small segment of this market that will make an impulse buy when they see the right bag on a site, and there are those that are in the latter stages of their buying cycle when they land on a site, but the majority of the traffic is still pondering, still deciding, still browsing.

• Some are dreaming of buying, but don’t have the budget yet.
• Some have the budget, but aren’t quite sure what they want – they’re looking for inspiration.
• Some are planning to buy for that special occasion, and will save up.
• Some are looking for a gift idea, and want to suggest that someone else buy it for them.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t help your conversion tracking data. Google only tracks when someone clicks your ad and then buys during that visit, there’s no simple way of knowing if that person returned bought later.

For many Ecommerce sites, a visitor has but two simple options: buy, or leave. Most will leave.

But there is a better way – choice. Give your visitor a choice, make it easy for them to browse similar products that might interest them. Engage them in a discussion, offer some help, some advice. Make it easy for them to tell a friend, or add it to their wish list and email them a reminder, or some other products as they come in to stock.

Become a companion through the buying journey – and you’ll still be there at the end when the purchase is made.

The quality of the traffic that you’ll get will also depend on the keywords that you’re bidding on for both pay-per-click and SEO; a search for “handbag” would typically identify someone early in their buying cycle, still browsing. Whilst a search for “red leather handbag”, or a search including a specific brand and model name or number would indicate someone later in the cycle, more clear about their need and closer to making that purchase. Find out how to improve your PPC traffic quality.

You can get an objective site review and learn how you can improve your conversion rate – talk to me about how this works:

1. Be nice
2. Be fully attentive
3. Exceed their expectations
4. Listen to what they’re really telling you
5. Help them understand how
6. Always follow up
7. Stay in touch

It’s a great seven-point plan that will work well, but needs to be implemented in appropriate ways for different products and services.

Well, it sure worked. In another bizarre (or planned?) unexpected release, Lily Allen was shown on Channel 4′s, The Friday Project revealing her third nipple. According to Lily, one in ten people have one.

Why then, did Jo Whiley report on her afternoon radio show on Radio 1, with an audience of over 4.5 million listeners, that over 400,000 people had watch the video on YouTube?

Planned or not, Lily is already popular, but this much press can’t do any harm to sales of her album and single. Talking of which, how about Boy George and the community service lark, and George Michael and the whole public toilet affair. Perhaps the spinners are doing too good a job, and these accidental, personal revelations just appear to be planned?

Is this Philanthropy, or a clever marketing ploy? Think about it. If you’re old enough to remember the early days of Microsoft, you’ll remember that it implemented a similar strategy. In fact, most software companies still do.

This strategy works in a number of ways:

1. The educational sector is pretty communal, there’s lots of sharing of ideas and word of mouth, so plenty of organic growth.
2. It’s a very large, well defined sector that will create a large user base very quickly.
3. Most importantly, what do we trust most as users? We trust what we know. As human beings, we don’t typically like change. When we’re getting educated, we use the tools we’re presented with because we don’t know anything else. When we leave education, we want to use those same tools that we’re comfortable with.

This strategy, often called ‘seeding’, produces exceptional results in the medium to long term, but you need a lot of funding to survive the investment period (like Google, for example).

I prefer to call it, a ‘candy sale’. Here, try this. Isn’t it great? Now, you want to give it back, or buy it?

He reported a concerning trend: agents appear to be over-valuing properties to get the instruction. Once the vendor is tied in to the contract, they can’t do a lot about it. But here’s what happens:

The agent gets viewings and some interest in the property.

My colleague, being a smart guy, knows that the vendor is already paying rent elsewhere so figures there’s a good chance of a reasonable offer being accepted. Also, being a smart guy, he does his research and discovers that an identical property just next door has sold for £240k just six months earlier – £30k less than the asking price for this property.

In the vendor’s head, they were prepared to drop their price by £20k for a quick sale. They are offended by the offer and turn it down.

The agent tells the buyer that the vendor won’t accept anything less than £246k. The buyer walks away, appalled by the tactics of the agent.

• The agent wasted their time.
• The vendor is disappointed and offended, doesn’t make the sale and is still paying rent and a mortgage. This is probably going to happen a few more times before they understand what happened.
• The buyer goes elsewhere, hoping to find an agent with some scruples.

Now, the real problem is that there’s no relationship to build here. It’s not like the vendor is going to sell a house every year and keep using the same agent, is it? Next time they want to sell, they might be a little wiser and get three valuations, and chose the one in the middle that is likely to be more realistic.

The agent oversold and under-delivered. Does it matter to him that the client won’t come back for more? Probably not, because the client wasn’t likely to come back any time soon anyway.

The painful reality is, these guys get paid a fat commission cheque for selling a property. Just how much is a recommendation from a satisfied vendor worth? Surely they really could, and should, do better?

See: Seth’s Blog: Expectations and this blog: Expectations.