Tried Facebook ads for Pokemon Go ( 2nd largest Facebook group in my country - Belgium), had some success there ( 330.000 people reach / week for a month). But it's not worth it for regular businesses. I started a webshop and Google AdWords seems to be the way to go.<p>Side note, we did events. One Facebook group had 2x as many members and was also spanning the Netherlands, they had 1/10th of our ticket sales. We were the first to combine amusement parks with Pokémon Go ( and cheaper then normal tickets, our revenue was a % on the ticket price)<p>Facebook seems to be an empty bucket. The ones who share your posts, share everything from everyone, while you give things away for free. It's the only way to receive a lot of likes, but those aren't the people you want and going to buy your stuff.<p>You aren't anything with likes. Invest in newsletters and a decent email campaign, that way you don't have to pay for the people that 'subscribed' to you, to let them see posts.<p>Ps. Pokemon Go was 0,03 € / like. Normal businesses pay 1€ / like in my experience. Don't go that road :)<p>Ps2. I don't do remarketing too. But that's personal preference, as i don't want to stalk people. I want them to find me, when they are looking for me<p>Ps3. AdWords for me is 1€/ day, which is the minimum. And I'm quite happy with it for my niche, which gives me 10 visitors and 1 purchase every 2 days ( pretty high margin)<p>Ps4. If you want to go on Facebook, remember you have to pay for: promoting your post, promoting your page and promoting your website. So facebook passes 3 times at the cash register. Pokemon Go was all on max for several days, which is 50€ x 3 per day! And in case you forgot, likes !== Customers and you still have to write good content :)
I'm CTO at a local newspaper chain. I ran a seminar on how to digital advertising, then ran $500 in advertising to promote the event -- all as a test to see which advertising mediums I could use to get people to show up to learn about advertising.<p>Here's the data and a summary:<p><a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DsJYUYETwQ7a-hISFPcCI7ojGtk2WtyGdxwQXSN6szQ/edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DsJYUYETwQ7a-hISFPcC...</a><p><a href="http://www.davisenterprise.com/special-projects/how-to-waste-less-money-doing-digital-advertising-next-time/" rel="nofollow">http://www.davisenterprise.com/special-projects/how-to-waste...</a>
Wanna know why tech companies get such high valuations?<p>Look at the operating margin and net income increase in just 1 year: <a href="https://twitter.com/mbesto/status/793921076820459520" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/mbesto/status/793921076820459520</a><p>That makes investors absolutely drool.
Facebook is the least transparent ecosystem. As a marketer, I find it hard to invest dollars without being able to see or understand what percent of custom audiences are exposed to ads. For example, one can upload a file (list of emails) to a custom audience, lets say 1 M big, for FB to ingest. Voila your audience is active for targeting, but how many of those emails (users) will be targeted, who knows. FB's inventory is overpriced and untraceable.
How did they go from paying an effective tax rate of around 40% between Q3-14 to Q4-15 to an tax rate of 25% this quarter?<p>Notably, they had 2,557 MUSD in income in Q4-15 and paid 995 MUSD in taxes and this quarter they have a larger income of 3,169 MUSD but pay less in taxes, 790 MUSD. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_presentations/FB-Q316-Earnings-Slides.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_presentations/FB-Q...</a> - slide 22
"Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 84% of advertising revenue for the third quarter of 2016, up from approximately 78% of advertising revenue in the third quarter of 2015."<p>Is advertising dead on the desktop?
That operating margin seems...impressive.<p>Well, hopefully it's not just me, but doesn't 45% seem like they're extraordinarily profitable?
Traditional media companies are really feeling the pain now, and it is probably going to be even worse for them when the advertisers turn even more of their money to google and facebook.
Might be interesting for Facebook to move from charging for ads to start getting their cut of successful sale. If they would crack this, there might be positive loop effect. Getting to know if users actually purchased something would give FB more data, which would allow better targeting.<p>Implementation of course is not trivial. One way to make this work would be for Facebook to run the platform where purchase and payment takes place, like Amazon Marketplace.