New Tips And Triks For You

As I write this, social media is abuzz with news of Twitter's IPO. Social channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are here to stay - and they all have PPC ad platforms. More and more advertisers are including social PPC in their search marketing mix.

While there are many similarities between social PPC and search PPC, there are some key differences. In many ways, social PPC acts more like display than search - but it doesn't really act like display, either. Social PPC has its own set of best practices for success.

If you're like a lot of PPC pros, you're probably struggling to get your head around the whole social PPC universe. So, I asked some of the top experts in social PPC to share their top tips for social PPC success.

Facebook Audience Tips

The power of social PPC is its targeting abilities. With search, you're targeting keywords; with social, you're creating personas. Accurate targeting is a great feature of social PPC, so it's crucial to get it right.

"Create and manage audiences in Facebook Power Editor to run and test ads with specific messaging for specific demographic groups," said James Svoboda of Web Ranking. "This will help control ad spend on new campaigns and helps speed up creation of new ads by having established audiences."

If you aren't using Facebook's Power Editor, bookmark this article to read later and go get started. It only works on Chrome and acts a lot like AdWords Editor for Facebook.

One of the great features is audience creation. You can create an audience in Power Editor and apply the audience to any or all of your ads. You can also create new ads and apply the saved audience to them.

Reaching your target audience in Facebook can be challenging, especially for B2B advertisers. My coworker Jessi Link recommends that advertisers "get creative with targeting. Since most of our clients are B2B, and job title targeting can be lacking on Facebook in particular, I've found it helpful to reach these audiences by targeting fans of industry publications, conferences, and companies that serve that audience exclusively."

Targeting competitors is another popular tactic.

"Targeting people who like/follow your competitors is one of my favorites," said Julie Bacchini of Neptune Moon.

Joe Drury of WebTrends agreed, saying users of all social PPC platforms should target competitors.

Drury also recommends using Facebook custom audiences. Custom audiences let advertisers target Facebook users by email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs, or app user IDs.

LinkedIn Audience Tips

Many of the Facebook audience tips are great for LinkedIn as well. Of course, LinkedIn has its own unique opportunities for audience targeting.

Drury said that "on Linkedin, groups are king." Using and targeting groups, as well as job titles and interests, is highly effective.

Robert Brady of Righteous Marketing recommends that LinkedIn advertisers "overlay targeting for increased relevance. Industry + Seniority + Job Function is a good one to try." I've had success using this method myself.

Bonus Audience Tips

I love the tip I got from social PPC guru John Lee of Clix Marketing. He suggested that advertisers "use the 'back door' - target LinkedIn and Facebook with the Google Display Network, layered with contextual keywords." Both LinkedIn and Facebook use the GDN to backfill their display inventory, so if you want to dip your toe in the water using a platform you're more familiar with, here's your chance.

Here's another tip from yours truly. If possible, prioritize your audience and create campaigns by priority.

For example, you may have a "hot prospects" list and a "cooler prospects" list. Create separate LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter campaigns for each audience. This allows you to use different messaging, bids, and budgets for each audience much more easily than if you lump them all into one.

Social PPC Ad Optimization

Ad burnout in high-impression social PPC networks is a real problem. It's imperative to keep ads fresh while still generating a good CTR. Ian Mackie of PointIt offers this simple, yet profound tip: "Use dark/old posts in Facebook to quickly A/B test images, headlines, and creative." Why reinvent the wheel?

Images in social PPC ads create a whole new level of complexity for advertisers used to dealing with 95 characters of text. Finding effective images is a perpetual challenge for advertisers trying to combat ad fatigue.

Getting attention in Facebook ads, in particular, can be tricky.

"Images of pretty, smiling women get clicks," said Justin Freid of CMI Media. "They may not be the right clicks, but you get clicks."

Jesse Semchuck adds that it "also helps if the woman is looking at your call to action button/copy."

While these ideas may sound frivolous, they're legitimate. People are drawn to people - it's instinctive. Our eyes follow another person's eyes. And pretty or suggestive images get attention.

Even in the more businesslike LinkedIn environment, images can make or break an ad. Choose them carefully, and test them relentlessly.

Images may have other editorial challenges, as well. Facebook limits text in an image to no more than 20 percent of the image. But there is a workaround.

"If you're getting hit with the 20 percent text rule and have to use a particular image, target your ads just to right hand side," said Timothy Jensen of Overit.

Twitter Ads pose a different optimization challenge, because most of their promotion options focus on promoting tweets, hashtags, or handles. Carefully crafted tweets work well, but there isn't a good way to split-test them in the ad environment.

That's where Twitter Lead Generation Cards come in. Lead gen cards are sort of an "ad within a tweet." You'll set up a lead gen card, and then send promoted tweets to it. Lead gen cards are effective for driving email signups, white paper downloads, and other common lead gen activities.

As Drury put it: "Lead gen cards rock for B2B!"

Social PPC Campaign Optimization

Most social PPC channels offer both CPC and CPM bidding options. On Twitter, you pay per engagement: click, retweet, or reply. Facebook and LinkedIn both offer CPC and CPM.

Facebook also offers Optimized CPM. oCPM is an advanced bidding option for users of the Facebook API. It allows advertisers to set a value for actions, reach, clicks, or social impressions. Once the values are set, Facebook optimizes ad serving against them.

Several social PPC experts recommended oCPM. Terry Whalen‏ of CPC Search suggested "using custom objectives with oCPM for Facebook bidding" as a way to improve performance.

Mackie is also a fan of oCPM. He said he always starts with CPC bidding and then moves to oCPM to optimize for whatever the goal is.

I owe a big thanks to Mackie for my final two campaign optimization tips:

Facebook's attribution window is set to "1 day after viewing an ad or 28 days after clicking." Depending on your sales cycle, you can adjust this for reporting purposes to be whatever combination of 1, 7 & 28 (days) makes sense. Qwaya is by far the most inexpensive Facebook Ads tool on the market today.

I'll be honest - I wasn't aware of either of these, and I'm now seriously checking them out.

A huge thank you to all of the experts who contributed tips - I know I'll be using all of them in my social PPC campaigns!

Got a tip of your own? Share in the comments!

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