Facebook Ads Summit – Info Dump 1
Getting my feet back under me from the trip to the left coast last week for the first ever Facebook Ads Summit. Fell a little ill but now ready to get back into attack mode. So let’s get to the info. Let me warn all the hard core knobs that we signed NDAs which I would can only hope that you would assume they would make us. Thus most of the info has to be kept to ourselves for now.
Day 1 started out pretty chill. It was an advertiser roundtable and Facebook had maybe a total of 8 or 9 companies attend. We grabbed lunch at Cafe X and quickly got down to business. As we settled in the board room we used, we took turns around the table introducing ourselves and our companies. This is when I learned we were the only affiliate marketers there. Kinda disappointed at first. I thought that a lot of the info would now be slanted towards the agencies and product owners (who advertise their own product) and not be as useful to an affiliate marketer. What I learned later, anything Facebook told us, if you listened, you could apply it to your business some how.
The Director of Online Operations and the Director of Ads Product Marketing glossed over some alpha/beta testing that most in attendance had been helping with over the past few months. Most we still can’t talk about but even the smaller changes like the new Facebook Ads Manager have went through months of beta and Facebook has had several iterations before they are released. This is one of the key points that we saw early on with the Facebook Ads team, they are trying to advance their platform. Creating tools and services that once out of beta will be useful to who they make it available for.
Facebook’s Ads Product Manager Director was very insightful into the Facebook philosophy. They believe in user experience first. When any change is proposed whether it be on the advertising platform or not the first thing they look at is how it might effect the user experience. User experience is the highest priority which I think they have demonstrated in numerous ways over the years but especially but not chasing every dollar that they see in front of them.
Another phrase that was dropped like rain was the Facebook Social Graph. This is what Facebook believes their actual product is. The more they talked about it and the targeting capabilities that this graph presents I started reading between the lines a little. I believe this is where the gold will be especially as they progress there platform. Being able to market into the social graph will separate the haves from the haves not. Facebook hinted at targeting capabilities and asked what we, as marketers, would like to see. Exclusion marketing was quickly brought up, multiple same line targeting (ie. men who like to kayak and who also like hot dogs – just in case you have an offer for hot dog eating kayakers) The amount of data that is available to them is insane. How many status updates do you think are made each day? 40 million! So 40 million times a day there is real time data added to people’s profiles. Wouldn’t you like target status updates of people in your city that include the word lunch for the marketing efforts of your local restaurant clients? Don’t you want to target the friends of the people that converted on your offer? Wouldn’t be bad to be able to re-target the people that clicked on your ads would it? I would use this daily. Endless possibilities. They have a lot of things on the table and are continuously evolving targeting and the data available and thus the ad platform.
This gets us through the first 1/2 day of the day one roundtable. One other thing that I wanted to point out while it’s on my mind. Affiliate marketers aren’t as large of a percent of ad spend as we like to think. Brand ads spends are up. Agencies continue to come on the Facebook Ads platform. Product owners who advertise their own product are also growing. Affiliate marketers make up a greater % of the total advertisers who run offers on the platform BUT I believe we are the smallest group in aggregate when it comes to % of ad spend. They value us but the guys screaming F Facebook they don’t want to make money and what are they going to do if we just stop advertising? They wouldn’t like it but I don’t know if they would blink or not.
This has gotten too long already. I will break up the rest of day 1 and day 2 into separate posts. I am back biznitches!
Comments on Facebook Ads Summit – Info Dump 1
In regards to affiliate marketers making up a tiny portion of the overall market, I think that nail was driven home after seeing Google’s earnings continue to skyrocket despite the large number of affiliates banned.