Steve Jobs became a
wildly successful CEO based on his ability to visualize the benefits that tie together a variety of digital content across media, music to movies, from companies such as Apple and Pixar. It's about
having a vision, finding the perfect combination, and putting heart and soul into making it happen, even when stricken with pancreatic cancer. No doubt about it. Jobs built a brand icon. There are
many perfect combinations.
The brand Hersey might describe peanut butter and chocolate as the perfect combination, while some men consider dark beer and dark chocolate a more favorable
variation. These days many search marketers will admit the perfect combination for targeting ads to consumers across the Web combines social and search.
In fact, marketers will spend $4
billion worldwide in 2011 on Facebook ads, up from $1.86 billion in global ad revenue last year, according to eMarketer. The research firm estimates that by 2012, worldwide ad spend on Facebook will
reach $5.74 billion.
Facebook made it so easy to build, bid and buy ads, so savvy search engine marketing companies could build the platforms that feed into the social network. On Tuesday,
Clickable became the latest paid search marketing company to offer Facebook ad management tools supporting social advertising.
The Facebook Advertising Suite, an extension of the Clickable
Pro bid management platform, introduces modular tools to create, manage and deliver dozens of ads simultaneously from combinations of images, ad copy and target audiences.
Writing ad text,
picking an image and choosing people to target works for those launching a few ads. But an automated process makes more sense for marketers launching hundreds or thousands.
The suite's ad
builder assigns ads to multiple campaigns or creates new ones. The media and target libraries allow marketers to store and manage assets for future use with tags and descriptions. It also works with
Clickable Conversion Tracking, which tracks with one tag a variety of Web site conversions from Facebook and other advertising networks.
Clickable is one of a handful of tech companies in
the Facebook Ads API beta program. Last year the company launched its first integrated technology to manage both search and social advertising through combined upload and edit tool, as well as search
and social conversion tracking.
Aside from the ads on the Facebook platform, Clickable will offer paid search and social advertising experts to create custom programs that drive advertising
performance across all major ad networks, including Google and Bing. Clickable Solutions can include campaign strategy, creative development, campaign launches, tracking, optimization and ongoing
opportunity analysis.
Marketers don't call Facebook ads "paid search," but they treat the medium similar because it's easy to deploy. What percent of your marketing budget will you allocate
toward Facebook, and will it tie into the company's search campaign?