Is the Facebook vs Google PPC Face-Off Coming?

A recent report on Brand Republic announces that "Social network Facebook has overtaken search giant Google to become the most visited website in the US for the week ending 13 March".

Now we usually expect new developments in the US to soon make their way over here (housing market crash, credit crunch, bank failures etc.) so it will be interesting to see how long it will be before Facebook possibly overtakes Google for usage in the UK.

A Bad Day for Facebook

Facebook has been plastered across the media today because of its use by a sex offender, Peter Chapman, who posed as a teenage boy to meet a young victim on Facebook, Ashleigh Hall, who he subsequently met and tragically murdered.

Its an awful case that has repurcussions for everyone involved - the local police force which lost track of Chapman for 9 months, plus of course the social networking site he used, especially as he has now been dubbed the 'Facebook Killer'.

Whilst Facebook can't be held legally responsible for the actions of it's users, it does just remind us all quite how easy it is to pose as just about anyone online - after all what identity checks does Facebook use when signing up?

It also reminds us all about the importance of reminding young people about the often overlooked dangers of social networking online. When I was running a focus group of 13 year old social networking users for the planning of www.kent.co.uk, we discovered just how little structured education these youngsters felt they received from either their schools, or especially their parents.

It will be interesting to see if/how Facebook and other social sites grasp this important opportunity to help educate web users.

(Then, just as the Facebook team thought things probably couldn't get any worse,  the site has been mentioned in another case of a man who murdered his former girlfriend, prompted it is claimed, by her entries on her Facebook profile.)

New Online Media and Advertising Rules on the Way

How up to speed are you about the forthcoming new rules about how businesses promote themselves online?

Last week the Advertising Association submitted recommendations to the Committee of Advertising Practice to extend the non-broadcast code to company websites and even branded Pages on social networking websites like Facebook.

It's been suggested that a refreshed version of the Code will come out in Autumn and will be enforced by the Advertising Standards Association, who already enforce the Non-broadcast Code (CAP Code) which already covers paid for online advertising.

My guess is that like most of us, this has one has crept up unawares, especially on smaller businesses. So I'll be reviewing both the current code and the new proposals shortly and will report back on the implications for websites, socil networking and online advertising.

Facebook Ads - Not so Bad After All

Sometimes you have to learn when to admit you were wrong. So, sorry Facebook.

I always thought the Facebook advertising program was rubbish - a poorly conceived attempt to monetise your impressive site traffic retrospectively, and no substitute for the mighty Google Adwords.

This impression was reinforced by the focus groups we did amongst social networking users at the back end of last year, for the www.kent.co.uk project. After all when a teenager told me 'why do I want to see adverts for mortgages on Facebook - I'm only 14!', I kind of had to agree with him.

But I now stand corrected. We have just started running a PPC campaign on Facebook for, ironically enough, another social networking site and it really is working. CTR is low, but I'm not too worried because we've plenty of volume of impressions to work with, and our conversion rates are very nice indeed.

I also particularly like the targeting options when you create your campaign - you can target users by their ages, with nicely refined age breaks amongst younger users, and most importantly their town/city, within a chosen radius.

This opens up a whole world of opportunities for regional and local marketing for clients targeting a younger audience, especially as I've always found geo-targeting to be imperfect on Google Adwords. I suspect Facebook geo-targeting is going to be far more accurate, as its based on the data provided by users when they sign up, not on Google's best guess based on IP address.

Now, the advert manager interface isn't perfect. The help guide is sketchy to say the least, and its very much a single user application, without any easy ways to share access with colleagues. But it's still not as bad as Yahoo Search Marketing so I can live with that.

So to conclude, I have now realised that my negative judgment on Facebook ads in the past really wasn't Facebook's fault - it was down to those bozo advertisers using the program poorly and clumsily. Just like the majority of Adwords advertisers who do PPC badly.