Facebook Ads: The New ‘Social’ Metric
Facebook just added a new ‘Social Context’ metric for Facebook ads
I’m not surprised. We had recently figured out that targeting on Facebook was not just useful, but necessary, and the single biggest targeting trick we discovered was targeting friends of people who were currently fans of our page. Why? Facebook uses social proof brilliantly by showing users who in their social graph ‘likes’ a given Page or product.
The Impact
The addition of the social context metric only confirms our hypothesis empirically, and beyond any doubt. Here is one little slice of our campaign data, that ought to illustrate the point better than I can with words:
Not only does a socially-targeted campaign yield a (predictably) higher click-through rate, the real story here is the impact of social targeting on cost per click. “Holy shit!” you say? Yes, holy shit.
Of course cost per action (CPA), which is displayed beautifully in the interior of these reports in the Facebook Ad center, is the real story. Suffice it to say that our CPAs for targeted campaigns were - well - astonishing. I’ll let you do your own estimating here, but let’s just say we ran ads to get more fans/likers of some of our Facebook Pages and …
Boom.
