Guest Post by Nicholas Abramovic. Nicholas helps singles meet new people at Zoosk – the largest dating application on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Hi5. Nick also covers affiliate marketing, advanced PPC tactics, and other fun stuff at many-body theory.
Facebook’s self-serve advertising platform now allows advertisers to target whether users have already added your application or not yet added it. This is a huge play for companies such as Zoosk Online Dating, Zynga Games, and other application developers.
Why is this important?
A lot of companies use application networks such as SocialHour and RockYou to get users to click off of other applications and get them to view your application. This is pretty easy, and as we have all learned from the lessons of SocialHour getting banned by Facebook – these ads can be pretty deceptive and users sometimes have no idea that they have added your application.
By allowing application developers to target new and existing users, you can set up different bids for what the value of a new customer from Facebook is worth, and what the value of someone returning to your application is worth (especially for companies such as Zoosk and Zynga which operate on a subscription/gifts currency where using the application is king).
You can find out more about this at Facebook’s official developers’ blog. A word of caution: I’ve noticed that this targeting is accurate about 15% of the time, so this new feature although very welcomed by the big players of Facebook applications, this is still very much a work in progress.
Official Story: http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=263
