Central Perk

joi, 19 iulie 2012

Facebook Promoted Posts vs Sponsored Stories

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 08:03 PM PDT

There's been a lot of buzz around Facebook's Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I've read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook's Sponsored Story ads, and thought it would be interesting to do a similar test here at SEOmoz. Before I jump in to the results of my test, I'll give a quick overview on Promoted Posts for those who aren't familiar.

What's the Difference Between a Promoted Post and a Sponsored Story?

Facebook rolled out their Promoted Post feature at the end of May, allowing Brand Page owners to pay to push content to a broader audience than normal. What some people don't know is that when you publish content on your Facebook Brand Page, only a small percentage of your fans are seeing that content appear in their news feeds.

Facebook uses its complex EdgeRank algorithm to determine which content each user sees in their news feed. Facebook estimates that only 16% of a company's fans will see every post they generate in their news feed. Some companies will obviously have a much higher percentage of engaged fans than others, but it shows that simply publishing content on your Brand Page won't get it seen by 100% of your audience.

So, this is where Promoted Posts come in handy. You now can dedicate up to $100 to "promote" a recent post on your Facebook Brand Page. Facebook says, "Your promoted posts will be seen by a larger percentage of the people who like your page than would normally see it. It will also be seen by a larger percentage of the friends of people who interact with your post." What this means is that Facebook will distribute your content to a much broader segment of your fan base instead of just the fans who are already engaged with your brand. Sounds interesting, right?

Now, let's quickly discuss another tool for distributing your content on Facebook to a broad audience. Facebook's Sponsored Story is created within the Facebook Ad Platform and functions just like a Facebook Ad. You can set this up the same way as you set up Facebook Ads and select your targeting from the large list of available targeting and interest category options that Facebook provides. You'll create an ad image, write your ad copy, link to your content, assign a budget, set your bid, and then activate it. The main difference is that Sponsored Stories look like Facebook ads so they only appear in the right side of the Facebook Page where all the other ads are, and they will mainly target people who aren't fans of your Brand Page.

The Test: Promoted Post vs Sponsored Story

Show me the results, baby! We decided to use a recent update to our Beginner's Guide to SEO as the content piece that we would Promote and run in our Sponsored Story. For the Promoted Post, we created a simple post on our Brand Page linking to the Beginner's Guide and dedicated $100 to it. This Post had a reach of 26,275. It generated 198 actions, 1,311 clicks and had a CTR of 4.99%. The CPC was $.076.

For the Sponsored Story, we targeted 266,580 people who live in the US, Canada, UK, or Australia and like SEO related topics and websites. The actual reach of the campaign was 44,247 with a frequency of 6.2. This Sponsored Story generated 16 actions, 162 clicks, had a CTR of 0.366% and a CPC of $1.44.

As you can see from our test results, the Promoted Post generated far more engagement than the Sponsored Story, had a higher CTR, and had a significantly lower CPC!

	Campaign Reach	Actions	Clicks	CTR	Spend	CPC
Promoted Post	26,275	198	1,311	4.990%	$100.00	$0.076
Sponsored Story	44,247	16	162	0.366%	$233.47	$1.441

The only area that the Sponsored Story out-performed the Promoted Post was in campaign reach. This makes sense since we were targeting a large group of SEO professionals and enthusiasts through Facebook Ads' interest targeting. At the end of the day, our Promoted Post to our fans who had not engaged with us in a significant amount of time generated a huge amount of interest in our content and drove a majority of the actions and clicks on our post.

To conclude, the combination of a Promoted Post and a Sponsored Story helped us to achieve metrics on our post that we have never seen before on our Brand Page.

This was our most viewed post ever (more than 5x's the previous record and was also the most liked and most shared)! While this didn't necessarily generate revenue for us, it was great to see how the Promoted Post and Sponsored Story can work together to achieve massive reach and engagement. The next step will be to see how the Promoted Post and Sponsored Story tools perform when driving a promotional offer or direct CTA type of content.

In the end, the main thing this test taught us was that it's important for every advertiser and brand to test things on their own. Just because one company sees a certain set of results doesn't mean that your company will see the same. Every brand, fan base, target audience, and customer base is different and will react differently so what it boils down to in my opinion is test, test, and test again.

I hope this analysis was helpful, and I'd love to hear from any of you who've run similar tests or messed around with the Promoted Post and Sponsored Story to see what types of results you've experienced.

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Photo: A Paw Up on Things

Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, July 19, 2012

Photo: A Paw Up on Things

White House photographers are hard at work every day capturing some incredible moments for history, and every month we release a photo gallery that takes you behind the scenes, giving you an inside look at the President and what keeps him busy.

Check out our June gallery, including photos of the G20 Summit, the President welcoming the New York Giants to the White House, and some great photos of Bo, the First Dog.

Check out our behind-the-scenes gallery from June:

Brian Mosteller, Director of Oval Office Operations, sits with Bo, the Obama family dog, in the Outer Oval Office, June 20, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Seth's Blog : The importance of going first

The importance of going first

The second person to write a story about a young boy and an escaped slave on the Mississippi wasn't a novelist, he was a typist.

"Just like that hot viral video but different/better/more clever," is extremely different from "that hot viral video."

In more and more fields, the originator of the novel idea reaps an outsize share of the benefits. One reason is that it's easier to gain attention quickly. Another is that once you gain attention and reputation, it's easier to lock in permission and turn it into a foundation for your next project. And most of all, when attention is precious, earning that attention with innovation is priceless.

Yes, there are exceptions for those that bring service or price or reliability along to polish an existing idea. And there are certainly businesses that profit from taking over after the innovator, exhausted, gives up and moves on.

But given the choice, I'd say first is a better use of your talent.

• Email to a friend •

miercuri, 18 iulie 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

"China Rebalancing Has Begun"; What are the Global Implications? Michael Pettis on China Rebalancing, Chinese Price Deflation, and Spain Exit from Euro; Target 2 Revisited

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 12:21 PM PDT

Michael Pettis at China Financial Markets has some interesting comments via email regarding much needed China rebalancing and a timeframe for a possible Spain exit from euro.

Pettis On Spain Exit ...

How will Spanish households react to a default on preferred shares and subordinated bonds, or even a very public discussion about the possibility of such a default?　 I don't know, but I assume that it will speed up deposit withdrawals from the banking system even more.　 For that reason it continues to be a very good idea to keep an eye on Target 2 balances.　 These serve as a pretty good proxy, I think, for the behavior of depositors.

Things are evolving in Spain exactly as we would expect them to evolve according to the sovereign-debt-crisis handbook.　 Unless we get real fiscal union in Europe, or Germany leaves the euro, or Germany stimulates its economy into running a very large trade deficit, or the euro depreciates by 15-20% against the dollar in the next year – all very unlikely, I think – I really see no reason to doubt that Spain will leave the euro and restructure its debt within the next few years.　

Mish Comments on Target 2

Target 2 stands for Trans-European Automated Real-time Gross Settlement System. It is a reflection of capital flight from the "Club-Med" countries in Southern Europe (Greece, Spain, and Italy) to banks in Northern Europe.

Please see Target2 and the ELA (Emergency Liquidity Assistance) program; Reader From Europe Asks "Can You Please Explain Target2?" for a more compete description.

There is much misinformation floating around on how Target 2 works, what Germany's liabilities are, so please click on the above link if you are interested in target 2 balances.

The following chart from PIMCO article TARGET2: A Channel for Europe's Capital Flight shows the capital flight through March. The problem has accelerated since then, because of fears in Spain and Italy.

Pettis On China Price Deflation...

China's official GDP growth rate has fallen sharply – on Friday Beijing announced that GDP growth for the second quarter of 2012 was a lower-than-expected 7.6% year on year, the lowest level since 2009 and well below the 8.1% generated in the first quarter. This implies of course that quarterly growth is substantially below 7.6%.　 Industrial production was also much lower than expected, at 9.5% year on year.　

In fact China's real GDP growth may have been even lower than the official numbers.　 This is certainly what electricity consumption numbers, which have been flat, imply, and there have been rumors all year of businesses being advised by local governments to exaggerate their revenue growth numbers in order to provide a better picture of the economy. 　Some economists are arguing that flat electricity consumption is consistent with 7.6% GDP growth because of pressure on Chinese businesses to improve energy efficiency, but this is a little hard to believe.　 That "pressure" has been there almost as long as I have been in China (over ten years) and it would be startling if only now did it have an impact, especially with such a huge impact occurring so suddenly.

Adding to the slow economic growth, the country may be tipping into deflation.　 Last Monday the National Bureau of Statistics released the following inflation data:

In June, the consumer price index (CPI) went up by 2.2 percent year-on-year. The prices grew by 2.2 percent in cities areas and 2.0 percent in rural areas. The food prices went up by 3.8 percent, while the non-food prices increased by 1.4 percent. The prices of consumer goods went up by 2.3 percent and the prices of services grew by 1.9 percent. In the first half of this year, the overall consumer prices were up by 3.3 percent over the same period of previous year.

In June, the month-on-month change of consumer prices was down by 0.6 percent, prices in cities and rural went down by 0.6 and 0.5 percent respectively. The food prices dropped by 1.6 percent, the non-food prices kept at the same level (the amount of change was 0). The prices of consumer goods decreased by 0.9 percent, and the prices of services increased by 0.3 percent.

My very smart former PKU student Chen Long, who follows monetary conditions in China as closely as anyone else I know tells me:

The most interesting thing is that even if CPI remains stable month-on-month, it will turn negative year-on-year in January 2013.　 And if it continues to decline month-on-month at current rates, we could see negative year-on-year CPI as early as August/September. 　

Unlike some other analysts, in other words, I am not concerned about deflation persisting for long unless the PBoC cuts interest rates much more sharply than any of us expect.　 I know this may sound strange – most analysts believe that cutting interest rates will actually reignite CPI inflation – but remember that the relationship between inflation and interest rates in China is, as I have discussed many times before, not at all like the relationship between the two in the US.　 It works in the opposite way because of the very different structure of Chinese debt and consumption.

Pettis On China Rebalancing...

After many failed attempts, over the past six months we may be seeing for the first time the beginning of China's urgently needed economic rebalancing, in which China reduces its overreliance on investment in favor of consumption.

Regular readers of my newsletter may be surprised to see me say this.　 For the past four or five years analysts have been earnestly assuring us that the rebalancing process had finally begun, and I had always insisted that it couldn't have begun yet.

Why?　 Because as I understand it rebalancing is almost arithmetically impossible under conditions of high GDP growth rates and low real interest rates.　 Once the real numbers came in, it always turned out that in fact imbalances had gotten worse, not better.　 Typically many of those too-eager analysts have resorted to insisting that the consumption data are wrong, although even if they are right this does not confirm that rebalancing had taken place since errors in reporting consumption have always been there.

But this time seems different.　 Now for the first time I think maybe the long-awaited Chinese rebalancing may have finally started.　

Of course the process will not be easy. With China's consumption share of GDP at barely more than half the global average, and with the highest investment rate in the world, rebalancing will require determined effort.

How to rebalance

The key to raising the consumption share of growth, as I have discussed many times, is to get household income to rise from its unprecedentedly low share of GDP.　 This requires that among other things China increase wages, revalue the renminbi and, most importantly, reduce the enormous financial repression tax that households implicitly pay to borrowers in the form of artificially low interest rates.

Forcing up the real interest rate is the most important step Beijing can take to redress the domestic imbalances and to reduce wasteful spending.

And this seems to be happening.　 [Yet] Beijing has reduced interest rates twice this year, and reluctant policymakers are under intense pressure to reduce them further.　 [However] The students in my central bank seminar at PKU tell me that there are new rumors about the way the cuts were implemented.　 "Usually it is the PBoC that submits a proposal of rates cut to the State Council," one of them wrote me recently, "but this time (July 5th) it was the State Council who handed down to the PBoC the decision to cut rates, so that the PBoC was not fully aware of the rates cut before July 5th."

If my student is right (and this class has an impressive track record), this suggests that monetary easing is being driven by political considerations, not economic ones, which of course isn't at all a surprise.　 But even with the rate cuts, perhaps demanded by the State Council, with inflation falling much more quickly than interest rates the real return for household depositors has soared in recent months, as has the real cost of borrowing.　 China, in other words, is finally repairing one of its worst distortions.

China bulls, late to understand the unhealthy implications of the distortions that generated so much growth in the past, have finally recognized how urgent the rebalancing is, but they still fail to understand that this cannot happen at high growth rates.　 The problem is mainly one of arithmetic.　 China's investment growth rate must fall for many years before the household income share of GDP is high enough for consumption to replace investment as the engine of rapid growth.

As China rebalances, in other words, we would expect sharply slowing growth and rapidly rising real interest rates, which is exactly what we are seeing.　 Rather than panicking and demanding that Beijing reverse the process, we should be relieved that Beijing is finally resolving its problems.

As an aside, we need to make two adjustments to the trade surplus in order to understand what is really going on within the balance of payments.　 First, one of the causes of last month's weak imports has been a sharp decline in commodity purchases.　 I have many times argued that commodity stockpiling artificially lowers China's trade surplus by converting what should be classified as a capital account outflow into a current account inflow.　 If China is now destocking, then China's real trade surplus is actually lower than the posted numbers.

Second, we know that wealthy Chinese businessmen have been disinvesting and taking money out of the country at a rising pace since the beginning of 2010.　 One of the ways they can do so, without running afoul of capital restrictions, is by illegally under- or over-invoicing exports and imports.　 This should cause exports to seem lower than they actually are and imports to seem higher.　 The net effect is to reduce the real trade surplus.

Since these two processes, commodity de-stocking and flight capital, work in opposite ways to affect the trade account, it is hard to tell whether China's real trade surplus is lower or higher than the reported surplus.　 But once de-stocking stops, we should remember that the trade numbers probably conceal capital outflows.

How does all this affect the world?　 In the short term rebalancing may increase the amount of global demand absorbed by China, but over the longer term it should reduce it.　 Rebalancing will inevitably result in falling prices for hard commodities, and so will hurt countries like Australia and Brazil that have gotten fat on Chinese overinvestment. 　Rising Chinese consumption demand over the long term and lower commodity prices, however, are positive for global growth overall, and especially for net commodity importers.　 Slower growth in China, it turns out, is not necessarily bad for the world.　 The key is the evolution of the trade surplus.

There is much more in his email that I wanted to use, but I stretched the bounds of fair use already.

Those wishing to see more can follow Michael Pettis on his blog China Financial Markets which I consider one of the very few "must read" sites.

The above report should appear on his blog shortly, with more details. Thanks Michael!

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Voters From Both Parties Overwhelmingly Support Big Defense Cuts

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 01:25 AM PDT

Mitt Romney needs to wake up to this simple political reality: Voters Overwhelmingly Want Big Defense Cuts

Americans of all stripes have had enough of massive Pentagon budgets and want significant cuts in defense spending, according to new survey data released on Monday.

In Republican and Democratic districts across the country, 74 percent and 80 percent of respective voters said they want less defense spending, the study found.

On average, voters indicated that they wanted a budget for fiscal 2013 that would be nearly 20 percent less than current defense spending.

With $645 billion enacted for total defense spending this year, the average voter's preferred budget for next year, an 18 percent cut, would translate into a $116 billion savings—money lawmakers trying to balance the budget could sorely use.

"The idea that Americans' would want to keep total defense spending up so as to preserve local jobs is not supported by the data," said Steven Kull, director of the Program for Public Consultation, which conducted the survey with the Stimson Center and the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative journalism group.

Mitt Romney must be living in some kind of alternate universe. He sees a need to increase military spending. That stance is going to cost him plenty of independent votes, and I believe the election.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Damn Cool Pics

Challenges of Getting to Mars: Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror [Video]
Hyundai's Zombie Survival Machine
Catwoman Timeline
Alaska Town Mayor is a Cat Named Stubbs
Analysis of Australian Ecommerce Statistics [Infographic]
Couple Meets for the First Time After 5-Year Long Distance Relationship [VIDEO]
Only In Mexico
Japanese Man Eats Burger with 1000 Slices of Cheese

Challenges of Getting to Mars: Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror [Video]

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 05:03 PM PDT

Team members at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory share the challenges of the Curiosity Mars rover's final minutes to landing on the surface of Mars.

Hyundai's Zombie Survival Machine

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 04:38 PM PDT

Hyundai unveiled its Elantra-based Zombie Survival Machine at this year's Comic-Con. The Zombie Survival Machine was designed by The Walking Dead creator/writer Robert Kirkman and fabricated by Design Craft for Hyundai. The Hyundai coupe is now officially ready for anyone who needs to survive a zombie invasion.

Via HyundaiUndead.com

Catwoman Timeline

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 04:23 PM PDT

See how the tempting but dangerous Batman series character has been portrayed in films from 1966 till now.

Alaska Town Mayor is a Cat Named Stubbs

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 03:07 PM PDT

Red cat named Stubbs is a local celebrity in Alaskan town of Talkeetna. He doesn't play in the movies and he is not a famous person's pet. For 15 years Stubbs has been the town's mayor. Known locally as "Mayor Stubbs," the feline's popularity is undisputed: he has 1,000 friends on Facebook, which exceeds the town's 900 residents.

As the story goes, 15 years ago many of Talkeetna's residents didn't think much of the candidates who were running for mayor. So as a joke, they encouraged enough people to elect Stubbs the cat as a write-in candidate. He ended up winning, and has held this honorary office ever since. Most of the time Stubbs hangs out in the local general store, where he eats cat food and meets with his voters.

Analysis of Australian Ecommerce Statistics [Infographic]

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 12:02 PM PDT

Competitions.com.au took a careful look at online spending trends in Australia to compile this infographic, and seeing that online sales are predicted to be worth $37.1 billion by next year, it looks like mobile is definitely the place to be.

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Couple Meets for the First Time After 5-Year Long Distance Relationship [VIDEO]

Posted: 17 Jul 2012 10:06 PM PDT

Youtuber Cadynow says:

After meeting for the first time on a Halo 3 game lobby 5 years ago, we built a relationship as best friends for 3 years through video games, myspace to facebook, then finally skype. Once we talked "face to face" we hit it off as a couple from then on. Now we finally got to meet in person for the first time after dating for 2 years...

Only In Mexico

Posted: 17 Jul 2012 09:05 PM PDT

Every country has its quirks, and Mexico is no different thanks to these classic photos.

Japanese Man Eats Burger with 1000 Slices of Cheese

Posted: 17 Jul 2012 07:52 PM PDT

Japanese website Rocket News, which previously ordered a Whopper with one thousand pieces of bacon, is back. This time, the site ordered a Whopper with one thousand pieces of cheese.

Rocket News called their local Burger King to see if they could actually order a burger with a thousand slices of cheese. It seems it was, and Mr. Sato from Rocket News walked out of the fast food joint with a 25-pound, 45,000-calorie burger. Burger King even fashioned cardboard drink carries into a frame to hold up the burger in its paper bag.

Sato made it through 350 slices, before throwing in the towel and allowing the rest of Rocket News the chance to divvy up the remaining cheese so staffers could have enough cheese for the rest of their lives.