Facebook today announced changes to the Ads Manager tool to reduce the number of manual calculations advertisers have to do to understand how well their campaigns are achieving their objectives.

The campaign summary page in Ads Manager, the dashboard where advertisers can view their campaign analytics and edit their ads, now reports metrics that are more relevant to a given campaign. For example, if an advertiser says the goal of a campaign is to acquire page Likes, the summary page will highlight the total number of new Likes and costs per Like. If the goal is to get new users for an app, the tool will report new app installs and costs per install.

Previously, Facebook reported “actions” and “cost per action,” but these actions were not specific to the goal an advertiser had in mind. For instance, an advertiser looking for page Likes might have ads that are very effective in generating engagement such as comments or shares, but is not converting those users into fans. In the former campaign summary, the advertiser would see a high number of actions, but that metric wouldn’t give the advertiser the right impression about the success of the campaign. Now, advertisers will see the numbers that are most important to a given campaign, making it easier to identify whether ads are effective or need to be optimized.

Along with these changes, which will be available to all advertisers in the next few weeks, is an improvement to Facebook’s conversion tracking tool. Advertisers who run ads to a website with conversion tracking in place will now see their number of conversions featured more prominently in Ads Manager. Facebook will also calculate “cost per conversion,” and if advertisers set a value for conversions in their tracking pixel, Facebook will calculate the total “conversion value” as well. This makes it easier for advertisers to understand their return on investment for a specific ad or campaign.

Nothing seems to be changing about how advertisers create ads in Facebook’s self-serve tool and the pricing model is also staying the same. But being able to view costs per Like or costs per conversion without manual calculation will likely be a welcome change for Facebook marketers.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook’s initial asking price for premium ads including placement on the logout page was $700,000 per day in the U.S., according to an Ad Age source who was briefed before the product announcement at the end of February.

The figure is a total price for the large logout display and smaller homepage ad units, which Facebook sells as a bundle. Ad Age says the breakdown was $550,000 for the homepage ads and $160,000 for the logout page. The total cost is comparable to homepage takeovers on portals like Yahoo, YouTube and MSN, but not all advertisers will see Facebook offering equal value.

In previous years, Facebook “reach block” ads — homepage units that reach all of a specified demographic on a given day — cost between $300,000 and $500,000. But compared to takeovers on other sites, which are much more prominent and allow animation upon page load, Facebook’s offering seemed weak.

Since then, the social network modestly expanded the size of ads on the homepage, allowing slightly larger images and including more social context, such as thumbnails of friends who are connected to the brand. The logout page ad is a significantly larger unit, more banner-like than anything Facebook has offered in the past. See this example from Ford Mustang that ran this week.

Advertising executives we’ve talked to are intrigued by the new format, but have concerns about the value of an ad that shows at the end of a user’s session rather than while they’re logged in. The logout ad also does not appear to some of the social network’s most active users: those who are logged in all day on their computers and mobile devices.

To compete with portals for major advertising dollars, Facebook will have to convince brands and agencies that its more reserved ad style combined with the power of the social graph is more effective than traditional buys. Until then, we’ll continue to see advertisers spending the bulk of their budgets in other areas, even if they’re driving traffic to Facebook apps and pages. Absolut Vodka, for example, has a YouTube takeover today that leads to a Facebook tab (see below). In this situation, Google gets the big money and Facebook only gets the peripheral benefit of another pageview with a few sidebar ads and possibly some engagement elsewhere on the site. When the company goes public later this year, there will be increasing pressure on Facebook to monetize more aggressively.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Inadco is launching today as a cost-per-lead ad network for display advertising. The startup is similar to an “AdSense for Leads.” The company is also announcing that Dave Zinman, previously the general manager of display advertising at Yahoo, is joining Inadco as the Chief Operating Officer.

Cost-per-lead advertising creates leads from ads, where a users fill out targeted forms. Inadco believes that this is a multi-billion dollar market because a lead can be universally defined by all advertisers and it can occur online (vs. offline) for all advertisers. Essentially cots-per-lead ads result in a tangible way to get customers.

Inadco’s technology platform allows advertisers to purchase media on a Cost-Per-Lead basis, and enables publishers to sell ad inventory to earn more revenue than they can with impression or click-based advertising. Inadco then distributes the display ads across the web for advertisers. Founder James Walker says that Inadco sole focus on “solving the cost-per-lead problem,” telling us that “bringing cost-per-lead to dispay advertising is all we think about.”

And the startup has the backing of a number of well known angel investors. Inadco $1.5 million in angel funding from Ron Conway, LowerMyBills founder Matt Coffin, and RightMedia founder Michael Walrath. Last year, Inadco raised an additional $5 million in series A funding from Redpoint Ventures.

Google also dabbles in cost-per-lead advertising, and it seems like a safe assumption that the search giant will bring this format to display ads. But Walker isn’t worried-he feels that the enormity of the market makes there room for a number of networks.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As noted earlier by The Next Web and ReadWriteWeb, Twitter has just launched an updated guide for businesses for organizations interested in exploring how to make the most of the micro-sharing service.

Coincidentally, the @TwitterBusiness account hasn’t made followers aware of the changes yet – in fact, it’s been about a week since there’s been a tweet from the account.

The expanded business guide includes a section that helps companies start advertising on Twitter, inviting advertisers on a “journey with the most engaging innovative ads on the web”.

I’m not so convinced about the innovativeness of the whole thing, but Twitter does an excellent job at explaining how they plan to make money through advertising (Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends and Promoted Accounts).

Interestingly, Twitter also touts a seemingly new product called Analytics, which lets all advertisers gain insight into both paid and unpaid activity on Twitter by offering two layers of analytics (advertising product dashboards and timeline activity).

The Start Advertising page also comes with a hard-to-miss form, inviting organizations to indicate in which advertising products they’d be interested, what kind of budget and launch date they had in mind, in which regions they operate and whether they’re for-profit or not.

It’s anything but self-serve, like Google AdWords, but it’s a start.

With the soft-launch of this form, Twitter is effectively saying that it’s now open for business, and (hopefully for them) has a sales force in place to handle all incoming requests.

Will 2011 be the year in which Twitter not only figures out how to properly make money, but also manages to scale its money-making operations in a way that can lead the company to sustainable profitability?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook has concluded the private beta of its conversion tracking tool for performance ads. A small set of advertisers had a chance to try the product which allowed them to track actions such as page views, purchases, registrations, downloads and more taken on a website after a user saw or clicked a Facebook ad. Facebook says that “We are no longer going to offer our conversion tracking beta product. While we learned a lot from the beta, our focus is not on building a full featured conversion tracking tool.”

A range of third parties provide analytics tools for advertising, Page features, applications, and more. Facebook is apparently leaving this business to them.

The Help Center document for the tool is still available, as is the Conversion Tracking Getting Started Guide. These explain how users could assign a conversion value and SKU to tracking tags and paste them into their site’s code. Users could then monitor conversion data including time between clicks or views and subsequent conversions using the Ads Manager’s Reports section.

Without the tool, though, advertisers must calculate their own ROI, or use one of many third party tools. Though some hoped Facebook would extend the conversion tracking tool to all advertisers, instead Facebook asserts it will “continue to invest in tools that help marketers better understand the effectiveness of ads that are social and include social context from friends.”

Facebook followed up saying, “We recently launched social metrics in our Ads Manager as a way of doing just that” along with Facebook Ads for Applications to help social games and other apps raise CTRs by including the names of friends who’ve recently used the advertised app. However, analytics and ad units don’t replace the conversion tracking functionality.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook