ambient

I was speaking with my friend Yasuo last night and I learned a new Japanese word: mura-hachibu.

Mura-hachibu is what happened in the old days when the village headman decided he didn’t like you and drove you out of town. Being exiled in fuedal Japan was not a desirable state.

There is ongoing research into the modern day equivalent of this phenomena online - the most popular adaptation of this term is Google-hachibu - a description of Google’s ongoing process simply deleting inconvenient entries from their search results.

So now it happens on Facebook too, and not just to Scoble. But, so far, he is probably the most famous example of Facebook-hachibu.

The new Facebook Ads network presents some new opportunities for marketers. Whether those opportunities translate into any real value for consumers / Facebook users remains to be seen.

I wanted to understand how it compares to PPC ad networks from the likes of Google, Yahoo, and MSN, so I created a small text ad for Boompaste. It was denied. So I created a new one.

The first, disapproved ad said “Meta is Betta. Get all your news in one place.”

I think Facebook rejected it because you have to use the title of your company, product, or service in the ad title and body. Annoying, but whatever. I guess they are shooting for high quality ads, which is good for users.

My second ad reads “Boompaste: Meta is Betta. Get all your news in one place. Boompaste aggregates the most popular stories on the web.”

It was approved, for two reasons, I believe:

1. I targeted 16-40 year olds the first time. This triggers additional editorial review. The second time I targeted 18-40 year olds and it went live almost immediately.
2. I used the name of the offering in the title, as mentioned above.

So the ad is live, and within 10 minutes I had about 196 impressions and 1 click (CTR of 0.51%). Gotta love PPC.

I’ll post more results later. So far, however, I like the experience. It’s clean and well done, if still immature.

In order for Facebook to really compete, marketers are going to need:

• Data exports: there is currently no way to export campaign / performance data from Facebook. It would be even better if this was available via API, depending on the delivery options for reports. If you could schedule email delivery of reports, that would be fine.
• Some sort of transparency. This is a critical area where I believe Facebook is lacking, and it’s tricky because it’s related to privacy. When you buy ads on search or even content networks, you can easily see it live. For example, if you bid high enough on “laptop,” you can query Google, etc. for that keyword and see your ad running in its live environment. You can also view competitors and their ad copy. More sophisticated marketers automate this process.
• Automated ad placement - Facebook needs to understand that marketers with large budgets work hard to create consistent campaigns across a variety of networks. Nobody wants to manually create thousands of ads on Facebook when you can automate that entire process on Google. Facebook does offer a valuable enough audience to target it as a network regardless, but velocity will suffer in comparison to other networks.

I’ll add more later. You may want to read Fred Wilson’s blog - he is conducting a similar experiment.