Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
You've created a great Facebook app or game. Now what? A simple, great start is to utilize Facebook mobile. Keep in mind that with mobile ads, or mobile content of any kind for that matter, the screen size is limited. Your ad needs to be clean, with a concise message, and most of all, pretty. What’s the point of an ad if it fails to catch the users’ eye? So how can we get started?
Facebook mobile has its own web interface that makes interaction very simple. It is broken down into three steps. First, identify your target audience. You can pick your target platform, age, and gender. Facebook is even kind enough to estimate how many people could potentially see your app. The ad placement for Facebook mobile is front and center as soon as you open the app, masquerading as a standard post.
It’s also important to keep in mind the time of year in which you are posting your ad. Post-holiday ads have more competition, but that’s because they reach a wider audience. After Christmas, when all the good little boys and girls have gotten their wonderful new smartphones and tablets, the first thing they do is hit the app store to populate their new toy with the latest apps. The odds are that a sizable chunk of that mobile market is using Facebook. For the first time since the company’s founding, Facebook released that the time spent on its mobile app was greater than its website.
The next big question is, “How much is this going to cost me?” This obviously varies from business to business but let’s take a look at the different ways to pay. The second step to advertise on Facebook Mobile is to define your budget per day. How much money do you want to spend each day is going to depend on your cost of acquisition for each user. In other words, how much money are you able to spend for each new user who clicks an ad? The way Facebook sells ad space is with a Cost per Click (CPC) price. They use a bidding system, since advertisers in the same market are competing with one another. Each bid is generally under a dollar per click, but those clicks can, and hopefully will, quickly add up so it’s important your ad strategy covers this.
Who gets preference on ad space is based on ranking, usually determined by a simple formula: your bid multiplied by the quality score of your ad. Your quality score is “how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing page are to a person seeing your ad.” So if you’re Captain Moneybags, you can jack up your bid and have a terrible ad to get your ad higher priority, or you can go the less dumb way and make sure your ad’s relevance and related content are quality.
The final step is the most difficult and dreaded moment of any business's life cycle: payment. Just enter your credentials and the hard part is over. Monitoring and tweaking your ad campaign will be necessary, but Facebook gives you analytic tools so that won’t be difficult. Facebook ads reach millions, so to ignore advertisement on the mobile market can really affect your app’s sales negatively.
About the author: Nick Parisi is a Marketing Associate at Fueled, a leading mobile app design and development company in NYC. Nick does key research and creates content for the company, as well as contributing expertise to outside media.
