• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 15, 2011

I've been writing a lot about search marketing companies designing and launching social advertising tools. One seems to complement the other, so I believe we're going to see more often Facebook and paid-search campaigns intended to feed off the other, although rules for the former are much more stringent than those for the latter. Here's a Facebook advertising automation tool from Clickable that I think search marketers will feel comfortable using.  

The latest release of Clickable Pro, the company's flagship bid management tool, now allows advertisers to create up to 8,000 ads at once. When the Facebook Advertising Suite debuted in January, it could only support up to 32 ads simultaneously. The tool publishes up to 10 Facebook ads per minute, with about 600 new Facebook ads per hour delivered to the queue. Whew.

There were technical challenges -- namely software stability and presentation of ads when creating up to 8,000 ad permutations at once, embedded into wizard, according to Max Kalehoff, VP of marketing at Clickable. But creating many Facebook ad variations at scale with combinations of images, copy and targets is one of the fundamental challenges of performance advertisers for large campaigns.

The large agencies told Clickable that "bumping that capacity to thousands would make the tool even more powerful." So Clickable went back to the drawing board and made some back-end enhancements and user-interface changes to "radically" increase capacity. The benefits not only add to the creation process, but enable advertisers to do split testing at a much larger scale, to determine the ad variations that perform best.

"Performance is all about easily testing at scale, to create thousands, making the tool even more powerful," Kalehoff says. "So we went back and made some back-end enhancements and user-interface changes to radically increase capacity."

This benefits not only the ad creation process, but enables advertisers to do split testing at a much larger scale, to determine the ad variations that perform best.

Think A/B testing for search marketing ads. But this is automated. Kalehoff believes the key to success in Facebook advertising is split testing ad variations to find the most effective combinations of headlines, ad copy, images and audience targets. When it comes to anything online, automation typically saves time, cuts costs and produces better return on investments. Clickable's Audience Targets and Media/Image libraries enable marketers to create multiple split tests and save time using saved images and targets.

This aggressive product development cycle does not solely belong to Clickable. Efficient Frontier estimates advertisers spend about six cents on Facebook for every dollar spent on Google. Per CPM, Facebook ads cost 5% of that on Google, but advertisers get 37% more impressions on Facebook while paying only 6% of their Google budgets.

Google provides an "excellent" advertising medium for reaching in-market consumers who articulate intent with search terms. Facebook cannot deliver the same kind of user intent-based targeting -- at least not today -- but it can deliver a similar type through social signals.

Combining the two types of campaigns give advertisers a marketplace to adopt new metrics. Facebook gives advertisers campaigns with bid management and performance tracking they can run alongside paid-search campaigns across Google and Bing.