New ad targeting options on Facebook

Facebook has been a little quiet as of late. Apparently if you aren’t a search engine moving in on the flagship product of your sworn enemy or you’re not the media darling with apparently little or no security in your fiefdom it’s just not news.

Well, it looks like Facebook has been keeping their heads down and their noses clean and doing something that they have deemed pretty important; finding ways to make money. The Inside Facebook blog tells of three new additions to the ad network offering that make it easier for advertisers to target folks within Facebook. These additions come on the heels of some other improvements that are almost flying under the radar but the numbers are starting to show some progress. Considering that these actions are around actually doing business it’s a breath of fresh air as compared to the speculation and drama that is in the Internet industry news.

The recent spate of enhancements to Facebook Ads is continuing today with several new ways to target Facebook ad campaigns. Last week, Facebook turned on time scheduling, and this weekend, ad editing. Today, it’s enabling three new features: connection targeting, multiple country targeting, and birthday targeting.

Here’s a quick summary of three new enhancements:

Connection Targeting

This allows advertisers to hit specific groups within their network of connections. This targeting allows an advertiser to directly put ads in front of fans of any of their pages, users of any of their applications, members of any of their groups and attendees of any of their events.

Basically, Facebook wants to make it easy for business and brands to increase engagement with any users they’re connected to on Facebook through Facebook Ads, using it as a paid notification or cross-promotion channel. You can also target users who are connected to one of your Pages/Groups/Apps/Events but not to another in order to do more specific cross-promotions.

Multiple Country Targeting

Now rather than having to create individual ads for each country, advertisers can now create one ad for up to 25 countries so the benefits of this offering are obvious.

Birthday Targeting

While I don’t pay much attention to my own birthday, many folks on Facebook really do. Facebook sees that and is allowing advertisers to target these folks at a time that they may be so giddy that they’ll buy something.

The expectation is that Facebook is going to be adding enhancements pretty rapidly in the near future. When you have over 200 million ‘members’ it can be incredibly powerful to slice that group into more and more targeted segments so advertisers will have success without breaking the bank. Should be interesting to watch. Remember that $500 million in revenue number that was floating around recently? There will need to be innovation to get there and maybe Facebook gets it.

Source: Marketing Pilgrim