What are Likeographics? A search on Google will say … NOTHING. The term doesn’t exist, so I’m claiming it here, on this post. That’s right marketing mavericks, welcome to the world of Likeographics.
I gave a talk last night at the Jerusalem Business Networking Forum on Facebook Advertising. The presentation was called, “World War Me: Facebook Advertising That Works,” and later this week I’ll post that up for everyone to see. Today, I want to just talk about one slide from the presentation … can you guess which one? That’s right: Likeographics.
Advertising on Facebook is easy. At the top of every ad cluster is a little link that says, “create an ad.” Go ahead, click on it. You will be brought to the Facebook Ads tools. It will ask you to fill in a few fields:
- Title of ad (25 characters)
- Body of ad (135 characters)
- Destination URL for the link in the ad
- Photo for the ad
These main fields are important, and getting creative in such a small space is one part art and one part luck. You are then prompted to fill in the generic demographic profile including:
- Geographic targets narrowed down by country, state, city, and distance radius
- Gender, relationship status, and age
- Education level
Looking pretty good at this point. Targeting your audience using regular demographics will likely get you pretty close to having the ad surface only to intended target buyers. Facebook only surfaces the ad to users who have the criteria you specify, and since you only pay per click or per 1,000 impressions (the number of times the ad displays on a page) being able to control who sees it is an important feature to help control your costs on Facebook Ads.
Now let’s kick it into high gear for maximum savings and effectiveness.
The most important field on the Facebook Ad tool is the one that allows you to narrow down your target audience to users who have entered certain likes and interests on their profile. So for example, if you know your audience likes lawn gnomes, extreme sports, and Sports Illustrated, you can enter those terms in the ad profile. The ad will then only show to people who have entered these terms in their profile (note: at least 1,000 people have had to enter a term in their profile for it to qualify). Also, Likeographics are an “or” proposition, rather than an “and” proposition, meaning that if you list lawn gnomes, social media, and football the ad will show to people who have any or all of those terms in their profile.
Why is this so powerful? By studying and understanding the Likeographics of your target buyers, you can hyper-target your ad to them. This is the type of information that surfaces from a deep study of your buyers usually through a Buyer Persona Study. Incorporating Likeographics into such a study will not only give it the life that buyer personas require, but allow you to better craft and tailor your ad to reach that buyer, while saving you money on ad spend.
Studying the Likeographics of your target buyer will also reveal some pretty interesting things. You will likely find that certain interests related to your product transcend traditional demographics, and that pockets of users may be found for the same related interest in different segments you didn’t consider before. You can test this by removing demographic parameters in the ad tool and only including Likeographic parameters. The real time updating widget will return a number of Facebook users who share that interest. At that point I would suggest launching your ad, if you’ve reached a target number of possible that you feel comfortable with.
You can always play around with making the audience bigger or larger by split testing different ads with different parameters set (the widget will show you the new audience numbers instantly). So for example, you may try one ad with the Likeographics football, nacho cheese, or lawn gnomes with no demographics, which gives you a larger target audience. Then launch another ad simultaneously that includes the demographics, which should give you a smaller number. See which performs better over a period of 7-days. After the test period you can stop or modify the underperforming ad.
I’ll be writing more in depth on Likeographics in the ebook version of World War Me: Facebook Advertising That Works, set to launch in May of 2011. For now, I’m interested to know who out there is using Likeographics to target buyers, and what success have you had with Facebook Ads?
Related articles
- Facebook Tests Real-Time Ad Targeting (allfacebook.com)
- Facebook Tests Ads Targeted At Status Updates (allfacebook.com)
