Web Consultancy UK

Wow!  I’m thinking to myself.  That adverts just guessed my age.  How clever.  And it’s telling me I need an IPhone.  Next stop the Apple Shop!

OK, so that’s probably not what what the average punter thinks when they see this advert on their Facebook profile.  And in many ways it’s akin to those dreadful “It’s 12.39am, and you’ve just won a prize” pop ups you see on the kind of website you wouldn’t let your children visit.  But it does provide me with an excellent example of behavioural targeting, and demonstrates aptly how social networks provide a quality platform for the advertiser to utilise some pretty advanced technology, all at a very reasonable price.

Let’s break this advert down into two chunks.  Chunk number one is my age.  Facebook knows I’m thirty, and is quite happy to let the advertiser send this particular advert to anyone of that age.  No doubt the advertiser has a multitude of variations of this advert, each geared around a different year of birth.  Number two chunk is based around my interests.  I’m a big technology geek, and when I signed up to Facebook, I was happy to tell them this.  I could have equally have told them I was into golf, tropical fish, or porcelain figures of the late, great  Sir Winston Churchill.  The point is…  they know!

Facebook.  Youtube.  Myspace.  LinkedIn.  Bebo.  They all know.

And that, frankly, is great.

It’s great because I only get exposed to adverts that I’m genuinely interested in (ok, so I don’t want an iPhone.  I’ve already got a HTC Touch HD which I love like my own child, but I’m sure one day soon they’ll know that too).  And it’s also great because as an advertiser, I’m guaranteeing myself more bang for my buck, ensuring that my paid per click advert is only getting clicked by a customer who genuinely falls within my target audience range.

Home town.  Education.  Salary.  Job title.  Relationship status (this is my particular favourite - change your status from “in a relationship” to “single” and watch the wealth of lonely hearts adverts pop up).  We’re all quite happy to tell the social network powers that be about every aspect of our lives.  And they in turn, are quite happy to act as information brokers, pawning out our info to the highest bidders.

So what are you waiting for?  As a successful website owner, you should be taking advantage of this freely given information.  Setting up targeted advertising campaigns has never been so easy.  Not even Google are this accurate.  Never have you had the opportunity before to intimately understand your customer before you’ve even met them.  For every product, there is a customer.  And for every customer, there’s an advert waiting to be clicked.

Now, anybody got any Winston Churchill miniatures?

Now, I’ve got to be honest here.  I meant to attend the PPC seminars, I really did.  But frankly, I spend at least an hour per day running PPC campaigns, and if I don’t know it all by now, I should be shot.  So, let’s pretend I did attend all the PPC seminars like a good little boy, in which case, this is what I learnt.

Even mother Google cocks up now and again.  Fair play to Dan Cobley, Marketing Director for Google UK for holding his hands up and admitting this.  You’ probably suffered from, or at least heard of the GMail outage that hit Google on Tuesday.

Now, what wasn’t interesting was the cock up itself (we all make mistakes). What was interesting was Google’s competitors, and their PPC response to the situation.  Within minutes of GMail going off line, your search for “GMail failure” would have brought up a flood of email provider adverts boasting reliability, zero downtime and the like.  That’s what’s so great about PPC.  You can respond, literally, in seconds, to millions of people if you want (and you have the budget).  In today’s economic climate, PPC isn’t going to be about throwing large amounts of money at a campaign - it’s about using your smarts to make that campaign work efficently, and in ways your competition hasn’t thought of.

There was a lot of talk about Google insights at the show.  Now, I’ve been using this tool for a few months now, and it really is a wonderful thing.  In essence, it allows you to compare search behaviour on Google (so basically the whole web then) on up to five key terms, all the way back to 2006.  It also highlights terms that are rising in popularity and terms that are ‘breaking out’.  I.e. brand new search terms.

Go on, have a play - it really is quite fun!