She wanted to watch an episode of The Good Wife that she had missed so she searched in the Safari omnibar for "watch The Good Wife" and the first div under the search bar is an ad to some site that was not CBS that had the Good Wife available to watch via streaming video. To you and I, it's obvious that this "first result" is ad and we would skip over it to the first result. But to my mom, she thinks it's a search result and clicks on it. When she arrives on the site she thinks she's on the CBS site because they naively assumes like many consumers that the site showing the content would be CBS. She doesn't even think twice about the identity. When you are used to TV, you blindly trust that the site/channel showing the content is the correct one.
The only reason I discovered this was because she asked me to pull up The Good Wife to watch on CBS. I, being a savvier internet user, just navigated straight to cbs.com to search there. I got to their Good Wife site and lo and behold, there is no streaming video available on CBS, only teasers and behind the scenes content. I told my mom that "No, CBS doesn't have it on their site" and she was like "Yeah they do. I watch it all the time". I then asked her to show me exactly how she found it on CBS and that was when she showed me that she in fact was clicking on the ad in Google Search between the search box and the search results thinking it was in fact the first result. That's the power of intent and Facebook doesn't have that.
You're right that that's totally different from intent. But it's valuable for brands which spend billions [1] per year on exposure-focused ads, like product placement.
[1] http://adage.com/article/madisonvine-news/product-placement-...
That's a big assumption to make. The bar is low for search results because they have no personality.
For friends -- we know our friends. They have a distinct personality. Ads disguised as messages from friends could have a negative effect because of this dissonance.
I'm inclined to agree with davvid on his point about how personality isn't a distinguishing factor between Google Ads and Google Search Results.
On top of that, intent is was drives the conversion. Even if my mom were to inadvertently click on an ad in her newsfeed thinking it was from a family member, the content of the page she was redirected to would definitely let her know she had made a mistake and that the status update definitely wasn't from a friend or family member.
Sure they do...
Status Update from malandrew's mom: "OMG I can't wait to watch the new episode of The Good Wife tonight!"
Facebook ads: "Click here to watch The latest Episode of the Good Wife"
Facebook could has something better than Google intent in that they should be able to predict what you intend to search for before you go looking for it.
When you want to search something, do you first go to your facebook account and tell your friends "hey, I want to learn more about x!" and then go to your favorite search engine, and actually do your search?
I bet you don't.
In your example, if the mom is saying "tonight", it probably means that she wants to see it "tonight" (maybe she doesn't have the time right now). so, they should try to make the ad really visible that very night, so the user (this mum) will see it before she even goes to look for it anywhere else. But that would feel very creepy. She would think "how did they knew I wanted that?". It would feel like if someone is spying her. I think the average people is ok to have ads displayed while searching (maybe they will not even notice that some "results" are ads). But when the ads start having a very direct relation to what people posts, they start to worry about their privacy.
What I mean is... sure, facebook could infer the user intention, but in comparison, a search engine has it almost served.
My mom (again) is subjected to retargeting, but she doesn't identify it as tied to her identity so much as tied to the current search. She uses gmail for work and her personal account (because i set up a google apps account for her), but I doubt she knows that just because she's logged into gmail that google search is tying that information back to her identity.
This is a far cry from Facebook where people know that things in Facebook are tied back to their identity, and not only that is tied back to their identity in a way that may be visible to friends and family.
Both Google and Facebook track you, but Facebook is personal, and people are aware of that fact.
Yes, it's annoying if you're in the 95% of customers who won't actually convert. But it only has to be effective about 1 out of 20 times to be a huge improvement (and that 1 might even be you, but you're mostly annoyed by the other 19 times.)
If FB decides to infer intent from posts right away (when the post's content could be relevant to intent) and adopt a role of 'online assistant' with automatic instant suggestions, that will be creepy and, considering the amount of colorful emotions often present in FB posts, is sure going to cause a few interesting situations. But that's a hugely different product from the Facebook and the ad industry as we know it.
Maybe the user will watch on TV. You can't tell if the user is actually looking for a way to watch the show.
If it's on Google though, the intent is much clearer.
You could say that Google responds to your demand while Facebook (at least in potential) creates new demands.
There's no reason for an advertiser to pay to serve an ad for that. The ad was just given away for free. Unless you want to watch the show right at that moment, you wouldn't click it anyway.
So, I'm missing the part where Facebook can monetize the "new demands."
Example: Subject is a coffee-drinking, Vespa-riding, snappy-dressing, backyard chicken-farming, photo-snapping, game-playing father of two small children. He's not looking for bluetooth cuff links, but we know that once he sees them, he'll be likely to buy because that's what other people in his micro-niche tend to buy.
I know illegitimate streaming sites exist out there, but I kind of assume they are ad riddled and provide a poorer experience than torrents.
I guess you could say it's one spin on the curse of knowledge.
It isn't about intent - it is about interest.
> And if you do click an ad, you're less likely to become a conversion because your intent is still to get back to Facebook as soon as possible and see the rest of Dave's party photos or whatever.
Not necessarily. I'm working with a customer right now where I have a 24% conversion rate on movie tickets. They routinely shell out $7-$21 a pop with this conversion rate; the catch is, I have to be very careful about who I target.
This kind of trend goes across the entire industry of FB ads - target well, optimize and approach based on interest and the money will follow.
But still, the intent model of google adwords seems so much more stronger, whereas facebook's interest model just look like a centralized and refined adsense. Google has long given emphasis to the long tail, the specialized interest that bring as much revenue as the mainstream one.
The intent model is clearly stronger here, as searches have an explicitly parameterized specific content, whereas the interest model can only bring up revenue on frequent and common patterns (such as you say, movie tickets), since you cannot anticipate rarely occurring interests.
Go watching a movie are such an ingrained part of life for many people and thus we are always "on the look" for a good movie to go watch.
But try and do that with a car brand or any other non-commodity and intent suddently becomes the most important factor.
Generally speaking, the majority of online advertising is geared toward interest in the first place because interest leads to intent. Facebook is earlier in the customer acquisition lifecycle as you can grab their interest before the intent, and then they'll go directly to you instead of searching.
This is why Google in general has been so scared of Facebook (not that I think they should be). What is happening is that people are figuring out ways to cut search out of the loop.
Take a look at all those online games you see on FB ads now. I can tell you that most of the MMO ad budget now goes to Facebook as you can easily get people to download the game and start playing, whereas trying to pick people off search for MMO's is obscenely expensive. As search saturates, marketers tend to move towards the point of greatest ROI, which happens to be in the interest phase.
Cars are a tough sell, no matter where you try. I'm not saying that every single type of product works on FB, just that we really should not compare FB to AdWords in the first place.
The difference being that facebook doesn't make you watch a 10 second ad between each one of Dave's party photos.
That said, however, a very large group of users are there to play social games. With social game companies competing for ad space (for these often highly-profitable users), they're driving up the price of ads and making it less economical for other industries to advertise on Facebook.
This might be the case right now, but what about in the future? I think that's what Google et al. are scared about. If users spend 90% of their internet time on Facebook, and Facebook figures out how to serve users with "What they are looking for" 5 years down the road, then users will have a very low barrier to trying out the Facebook "look-up" service.
Right now, my use of the internet is (1) sites I already know exist, or (2) Google, in order to find things.
What if this becomes (1.1) Facebook, to look at things served from other sites that I like, and (1.2) Facebook, to find things that I don't know about?
That's scary for companies counting on the status quo. Sites' share of user time is important not for how they are now, but how things might become in the future. It's a huge about of leverage.
With Facebook there is zero helpful intent. The only intent when you're on Facebook is to use Facebook. And if you do click an ad, you're less likely to become a conversion because your intent is still to get back to Facebook as soon as possible and see the rest of Dave's party photos or whatever.