Smallbrain Solutions

Politics (particularly political technology) has always been a few years behind commerce… slow to adopt TV, Direct Mail, the web. Thankfully, at least online, tactics and strategies are jumping the divide faster than usual. Honestly, I thought it wouldn’t have taken this long for people to start clicking on rival candidate’s cost-per-click ads to drive up their costs… Unfortunately, it finally did.

Mashable points to a reddit story suggesting that folks start clicking on Rudy’s google AdSense ads.

As anyone who has done CPC ads knows, fraud is pretty much part of the territory. Also, the ad providersdo offer solutions to fraud. So, if you see a huge surge in ad-clicks with a concurrent plummeting of conversions, you are very likely a victim (which should be fairly obvious). You can see google’s FAQ on click fraud here. If you feel that your AdSense ads are being abused, you can contact their click-quality team.

Don’t let this discourage you from trying paid search - it can be extremely cost-effective for building your email lists. Let us know if you want to get a program going.

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While I am still bullish on the Facebook ads in general, I think the platform needs some work. Fred Wilson points out some weird stats on his post friday and the test ads we put up last week aren’t performing well yet. But I still think they can make sense. Nick at AllFacebook.com isn’t so confident.

Basically, our test ads are targeting some very small groups - and they may be generating branding value without attracting clicks, much like paid search can. However, I think there may be some value shown if you can get it local enough and make the ask tied to a value-add like an action via an application. Heck, I even clicked on and ad for an apartment yesterday. And not even for research purposes… More to come, certainly. We have some requests to do some more testing for clients using bigger test groups - so our outlook will be changing based on those results.

Since I wasn’t blogging much this summer, here are some not-great stats-posts from Valleywag and Reach Students.

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So, I have been testing Facebook Social Ads. I have to say that I LOVE the targeting platform. You can do some really interesting breakdowns of the facebook universe like Patrick Ruffini did here and get your ads really well targeted based on gender, networks, keywords, employer, age, relationship status and what-not.

The one thing that makes me a little worried is there reporting. Currently they are showing 99 impressions on the 14th, which is impossible since I started the ads this morning (November 16) at like 12.38 am. Also, these ads are driving traffic to a Facebook Page and it is saying the traffic stats are going to appear 48 hours late. That is going to be problematic. I assume that is going to get changed soon.

What I do know is that for a couple very specialized niches - one I can’t talk about yet and one that is for a college alumni group I was able to target down to a universe of like 1000 people each - which is amazing. Since I went with Cost-Per-Click, I’ll only pay for actual clicks. It should be exceedingly efficient. More later.

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