If you’ve ever heard Marty speak—a whirlwind of energy—then you can appreciate that reading his book on Killer Facebook Ads is like having him sitting next to you, explaining exactly how you would create ads for your particular situation. 200 pages of Marty—enough to make your mind explode with ideas!
My favorite parts are Chapter 7 (chock full of specific headlines and creative you can use) and Chapter 2 (pages of specific examples of ad strategy for a myriad of situations). If you’ve done Facebook ads already, you can skip the later chapters on the user interface, campaign setup, the history of Facebook, etc… But do note the golden nuggets at the very end where he has a number of interests pre-grouped for you.
I first met Marty 3 years ago when we were both speakers at an SMX event on Facebook Marketing. Back then, he was doing deep research on what users liked to do on Facebook. Facebook advertising wasn’t mainstream (and it still isn’t), so it was the wild west of people selling questionable products.
I’ve seen him give his mind-blowing presentation on ad targeting with interest counts—and it’s better every time! I do have to wonder about the references to gay people, L Ron Hubbard, people who work in the Senate that like porn, Microsoft employees that love Apple products, 13-year-olds who “like” Alzheimer’s, and other zany tidbits we can quantify.
A number of things have changed in Facebook’s ad platform in the few months since Marty’s book came out. However, the core of his message is about interest targeting and crafting messages that work—timeless principles from the days of print that are just as relevant today. It was Smart of him to do that, versus listing techniques that would be outdated before the books even hit the shelves.
Two things that have significantly changed since then:
- Sponsored Stories—this is the automatic amplification of content and actions by your users and the brand itself. While available in a rudimentary form before, it’s now the crux of Facebook Advertising. It’s so new that nobody has really written in-depth about the right combos of Sponsored Stories to use for each situation and which compound targets to also use.
- Keeping traffic inside Facebook. When you send traffic off Facebook, you immediately lose the social context, meaning the display of your friends you also liked the content or performed some action. Social context doubles and triples click-through rates and is what Sponsored Stories are based upon. When you send traffic off Facebook, you cannot run friend-of-fan ads and you eliminate your ability to grow audiences. Yes, you can have like buttons and SSO (for the geeks out there), but for the most part, it doesn’t work.
I’ve done Facebook ads since before the platform launched—back when it was Flyers in early 2007. And this is the best treatment of the core targeting and ad copy strategy I’ve ever seen.
