Open Graph action spec ad targeting is expected to attract a new class of advertisers while also encouraging existing clients to spend more. The idea is attractive because it eliminates waste. Every dollar spent on delivering ads has more likelihood of resulting in a sale.

If you just purchased an Eric Church MP3, Ticketmaster could advertise an upcoming show to you and expect that you may actually by tickets to the event. It’s good for Ticketmaster and you. So if you express interest in something and you are purchasing items, than you’ll be sent more offers related to your behavior.

Of course the whole thing depends on Apps being used on Facebook. So far about 60 new partnered apps have launched but many more will have to follow suite for the concept to become more attractive to prospective advertisers.

It should take a couple of years for this new strategy to have a great effect on Facebook’s bottom line but the technology and the concept is just in time for the social networking site’s much anticipated IPO.

*Physical addresses for most of the country
*Phone numbers at the physical addresses
*Email Addresses for a large portion of the country (120 million addresses approx.)
*Up to date IP addresses

Beyond the contact information, data firms like Elect Strategies offer information on
age, gender, race, religion, income, education, ancestry, and what language is spoken in the household.

Combining this type of information with existing campaign list of who belongs to what party, how much they have contributed to a party in the past, and other party specific information, yields good results for fund raising. By linking this already rich information base with specific IP addresses could take it even when step further (targeted advertising to PC’s and smart phones).

While this strategy is not yet a standard of the campaigning world, it could quickly become a more prominent method.

[Source: ClickZ.COM]

Ben Lerer, who is the co-founder of lifestyle website Thrillist, explained to us that a traditional media company creates content and sells brand advertising against that content. Although the company has evolved from its traditional roots, he still believes his company is a media company since it has the assets from the traditional side, a trusted brand, and an opportunity to sell advertising. Thrillist, however, is taking this model a bit further with the recent introduction of Rewards, a platform that is similar to the popular daily deals offered by companies like Groupon. So wait, does that mean that Groupon is a media company?

Do you consider companies such as Groupon and LivingSocial media companies or advertising companies? Let us know.

According to Lerer, Groupon and LivingSocial are media companies in this new media era. He goes on to say that more traditional media companies will evolve toward similar models going forward, just as Thrillist has done. For his site, in particular, he said that moving in this direction was a “natural transition.”

In a nutshell, Rewards from Thrillist are “localized experiences and offers curated specifically to our audience,” which is young professional men. For example, a recent Reward was called “Strip & Strip” and included both a lap dance and steak. Other rewards have included drag racing adventures, all-you-can-eat beef jerky outings, and more.

“It’s less about the fact that you’re getting a great deal, and more about the fact that we’re packing up or packaging an offer in a way that makes it feel a lot more like content than a sale,” he said. “We’re making sure that we’re creating a really great experience where the user feels not just a loyalty toward the thrills/Rewards, but also toward the establishment.”

One of the most interesting ideas behind Thrillist’s model is that its Rewards, a.k.a. deals, are targeted to a specific group of people. While the Groupons and LivingSocials of the world have created an impressive business model around deals, Lerer believes that other companies will chip away at this model and create more targeted services.

“I believe that we can provide a certain kind of person a far better experience than a LivingSocial or a Groupon can,” he said. “I read Groupon and Groupon doesn’t feel like it’s written for me. It feels like it’s written for every resident of New York City.”

He does think that the more traditional media companies, such as news brands, will have a harder time embracing this new approach. They are used to making a clear distinction between church and state. Nonetheless, let’s not forget that very traditional news brand The New York Times is trying its hand at this model with the launch of its deals service earlier this year.

“There are so many different ways that brands can go and spend their dollars that if you’re not able to go and make sure that you’re taking advantage of the relationship that you have with your consumer… then you may wake up one day and realize that you don’t have as strong a business as you once thought you did,” said Lerer.

He admits that it takes a lot of work but believes that it is the direction of the future. Social media’s dramatic impact on the media industry will also likely play a big role in this shift. Ironically, with the exception of Foursquare, social media has not played as big of a role in Thrillist’s success as one might expect.

Lerer told us that he recognizes its importance and thinks the company could do more with it, but that the more traditional form of email marketing has proven to be more effective.

“We built Thrillist before social media existed, and so we’re really good at getting people to forward emails and to use email as sort of social media versus leveraging the traditional networks,” he said.

Do you see traditional media companies adopting this model? If so, how critical of a role would social media play?

The popularity of both of these types of services indicate that consumers want deals and coupons. Everyone likes to save, and now that people have had a taste of some great savings, they will likely come to expect it in the future.

Have you come to depend on coupons and daily deals? Let us know.

These services have created an entirely new advertising model for businesses to utilize. As a result, traditional advertising, such as with newspapers, is becoming much less relevant for brands. In a report from Forbes, the redemption rate of coupons in newspapers is only 0.6 percent.

According to Vijay Pullur, the CEO of social couponing service SocialTwist, brands can’t target consumers effectively in print advertising. Digitally speaking, brands are better able to target since users can click on their preferences, but he believes that there is a better way to target.

He is proposing a new form of targeting through a platform called Tell-a-Friend that involves social sharing. While it is true that users can share daily deals and coupons through social sites like Groupon, SocialTwist allows users to share in order to receive a better bargain. For instance, a user could turn a $1 coupon into a $3 coupon if he shares it with 3 other people.

Pullur tells us that brand engagement is much higher with this model since marketers can target a specific segment and message. For example, a mom would likely take a Huggies coupon and share it with other moms that would need it. The benefits are two-sided in this case, because the mom is able to save more, and Huggies was able to reach a particular fragment of its market.

“The targeting that the social coupons provide is tremendously better than any other mechanism because it goes through sort of a human filtering,” said Pullur.

He went on to say that SocialTwist’s social coupons receive a 50-80 percent redemption rate as well.

It is a bit surprising that this idea hasn’t yet taken off with daily deals or other popular couponing sites, but, chances are, it’s coming.

When a user goes to create an ad on Facebook, they begin the process by designing the ad. Here they select the landing page, the ad copy, and an optional image. Then they are presented with the targeting section, which now features the keyword suggestions.

The feature was noticed by All Facebook’s Nick O’Neill, who stumbled upon it while testing features of the Facebook advertising system. "While it may not appear to be a big deal, this feature could help significantly increase revenue as each advertisement ends up with a broader reach," says O’Neill.

That’s a good point. It could be not only be good for advertisers, but Facebook as well. It could give Facebook advertising more weight and get more advertisers on board as a result. Add that to a possible web-wide Facebook payment platform, and Facebook might be able to make some good money.

The keywords are based on information users list in their profiles like activities, favorite books, tv shows, movies, etc. It can be hard to know what people are listing, so the suggestions could be quite useful.

"The increasing availability of electronic communication data, such as that arising from email exchange, presents social and information scientists with new possibilities for characterizing individual behavior and, by extension, identifying latent structure in human populations," says the abstract for the report.

Technology Review simplifies what is found in the rather complex report:

Small worlds expert Duncan Watts at Yahoo Research in New York City and a few pals studied the time of day at which around 3000 individuals at a European university sent emails over an 83-day period as well as the email habits of over 122,000 e-mailers at a US university over a 2-year period.

They found two distinct types of emailer. They termed the first "day labourers" because they tended to send emails throughout the normal working day between 0900 and 1800 but not at other times. The second group they called "emailaholics" because these people sent emails throughout the waking hours from 0900 to 0100.

It will be interesting to see if Yahoo incorporates such demographics into the targeting of their own marketing offerings. Marketers will always be salivating over new ways to break down potential audiences for more relevant targeting.

The only way to open new opportunities in this regard is through extensive research, and it looks like that is what Yahoo is doing. You can take a look at the full report here (pdf).

"It’s true that online media has been nearly overwhelmed by an onslaught of inventory — there’s something like 80% more online ad space, a lot of it from social media, than there was a couple years ago," says Forrester Analyst David Card.

This makes targeting all the more important. Luckily there are still channels that can accomplish some very niche targeting, and other channels that have not had this as a strong point in the past are starting to cater to it on a higher level.

"But for all the macroeconomic forces of ‘infinite inventory,’ some ad space — and some audiences — are worth way more than others," says Card.

Research recently shared by comScore shows that vertical ad networks – those that target ads to specific online audiences based on demographic or category content (not unlike our own iEntry Network) – are increasing their reach.

Of those networks tracked by the research firm, the collective reach has increased from 21.5% of the total US Internet audience to 57.1% in a year’s time from March ’08 to March ’09.

Audiences for these vertical ad networks are becoming increasingly more engaged according to comScore. "As more vertical ad networks prove their ability to effectively reach specific target audiences by aggregating mid-tail publisher sites, the industry will likely give greater consideration to these emerging ad delivery channels," says the firm’s VP Media, Lesle Litton. More on comScore’s findings can be viewed here.

Card offers some advice for publishers who are looking to keep advertisers coming. "Cut clutter, experiment with new formats, and know your audience really, really well, is the easy advice for online publishers," he says. "Build out a marketing platform that’s flexible in terms of targeting and in incorporating data from many sources. Encourage comparison. Add other sites’ inventory to your own. Pit your salesforce against multiple ad networks to see who can best monetize some sections of your site (but hold back the best stuff.)," he says.

It’s worth giving heavy consideration to how valuable your home page is as well. While AOL-like numbers are certainly not going to be incredibly common, Compete looked at just how much traffic a home page banner ad displayed on AOL’s home page gave to the advertiser in comparison with other sources. Long story short, that advertiser was probably quite pleased.

Facebook recently began testing a module that appears periodically in the right-side ad space that show relevant content in addition to the ads that would normally appear there.  This content includes Facebook Pages of which a user’s friends have become a fan, Events that a user’s friends are attending, and people who are friends of a user’s friends. While the advertisements are paid placements, the content is not, and is part of Facebook’s ongoing efforts to surface relevant content and friend information in more places on the site. As with all tests, Facebook will evaluate user responses and make ongoing modifications to the features of the module.

Original Article: AllFacebook’s Nick O’Neill received a screenshot of what is supposedly a new advertising layout Facebook is testing that shows 5 ads instead of 3 and has a wider layout.

When I browse Facebook, I see combinations of ads ranging from one at at time to five at a time, but they don’t look quite like what AllFacebook received. Here are the two side by side. Allfacebook’s screenshot is on the left, and what I see is on the right.

Perhaps more interesting from what O’Neill has to say is that advertisers are telling him they "are seeing much higher conversion rates despite lower click through rates" compared to Google ads. "The result is that advertisers keep coming back and continue increasing their ad expenditure," he says.

I said before that perhaps Facebook should be considered Google’s greatest threat as far as where advertisers spend their money. The gap continues to narrow between the two in terms of unique visitors:

It is not my opinion that Facebook ads will kill AdWords. I think they can put a dent in Google’s ad revenue, but the two are too different for them not to co-exist. Google ads target what searchers are looking for. Facebook ads target users who don’t know they’re looking for anything until they realize they see something cool being served to them. That has a lot of potential given that they’re tailored to users’ specific interests.

Hopefully you were sitting down when you read that because Yahoo thinks the news will blow you away. "We try not to oversell the changes we make to Sponsored Search — sometimes a button is just a button, after all," says Yahoo Search Marketing Blog editor Jeff Sweat. "So, we hope you’ll pay attention when we tell you this: the new targeting features we’re adding right now are kind of a big deal."

The demographic targeting allows advertisers to select audiences based on age and gender on Yahoo sites in both sponsored search and Content Match, then set a premium bid for those groups.

The ad scheduling option allows advertisers to go after specific time-slots. Ads can be scheduled for the advertiser’s own business hours, or just when they think the target audience is most likely to be online.

The ZIP-level geo-targeting feature is available for both sponsored search and Content Match. Geo-targeting settings can be mixed at different levels within the same campaign or ad group. It also comes with new dynamic mapping features that allow advertisers to select individual ZIP codes and surrounding ones.

More targeting options are always good for advertisers, particularly when budgets are tight. There’s nothing quite as effective as getting an ad in front of the exact people it was meant for.

Well, you can, you’ll just have to use placement targeting. Google’s AdSense feature that prompts advertisers to "Advertise on this site" is no more. Ben Ewing, of AdSense Publisher Support, says the feature didn’t do as well as expected:

"Our recent findings indicate that the Onsite Advertiser Sign-up feature, which allowed advertisers to sign up for AdWords campaigns on your site, hasn’t been performing as well as we had hoped. We’ve elected to gracefully retire this feature and focus our efforts on developing and supporting features that drive better monetization results for you. Call it time management, call it ROI, call it our unwavering commitment to our publishers. We want you to earn more revenue, and sometimes that means "sunsetting" certain features we created."

It also means Onsite Advertiser Sign-up pages will redirect to the main AdWords page.

Google Slides In New AdSense Feature

A few bloggers have noticed that Google is testing a new feature, dubbed by the bloggers as "sliding" ads. Alex Weidmann has screen shots of both horizontal and vertical ad listings where visitors can scroll through to see more ads:

"This is a another huge feature for Google AdSense because it will allow readers to find even more relevant information, which will ultimately make the publisher more money. I am yet to see the sliders on any ad type other than horizontal ads so far, but I can only assume Google will have an answer for the other ad types soon."

Google Quietly Updates Analytics

MarketingPilgrim’s Andy Beal snagged a shot of a new feature on Google Analytics that allows users to compare specific data points like visits, pageviews, pages per visit, average time on site, bounce rate, and percent of new visits.

It’s All About The Links

SEOers are buzzing about Dutch webmaster Joost de Valk’s new Firefox extension for SEO link analysis. The straightforwardly-named SEO Link Analysis extension pulls together link information from Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Microsoft Webmaster Central.