Given the opportunity to speak about remarketing/retargeting, XA.net CEO Rob Leathern, was pleased with the crowds and session attendance and had this to say:

“People across online advertising disciplines are committed to learning all they can – to incorporate best practices and new technologies for improved campaign performance. Remarketing connects search and display advertising efforts like no other technology, and, when used correctly, can drastically improve conversion metrics for both mediums. It was good to see so many people engaged on the subject.”

Rob’s portion of the panel presentation focused on case studies that showed the best practices XA.net has used implementing retargeting/remarketing for clients’ display campaigns.

Check out Rob’s Introduction to Remarketing presentation slides.

In the piece, Ad Age mentions that the two largest social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook, represent more than a fifth of all advertising traffic, but are only drawing an average $.56 CPM compared to the $2.43 CPM average for the internet at large. In fact, the averages for the largest player, Facebook may even be lower than that.

I don’t believe that thinking about the “average” CPM is that helpful – because as we know, impressions are not commodities (if they were,  our lives would be a WHOLE lot easier!). Instead of considering how a handful of large social media sites are pushing down the average CPM, we think social media represents a very exciting opportunity for advertisers for the following reasons:

• There is a low initial starting point in terms of budget to get started with these systems
• Connection-based targeting opportunities offer an intriguing targeting prospect
• Social media ad systems like Facebook’s allow for easy demographic-based buying
• Conversion tracking is now directly possible on some of these social media sites (earlier one had to use redirects)
• Text plus image ads are easier to iterate than graphical banners, meaning many more tests can be run in parallel, more quickly
• Perceptually, low CPMs on social media sites appear to be a good opportunity to start testing ad concepts, and lower some of the barriers for advertising

Tools like XA.net’s Text Ad Creator (with our Facebook advertising API integration) can help automate the creation and optimization of tens or hundreds of different creative/landing page combinations, to allow for more efficient and effective advertising. Contact us to learn more. In terms of connection-based targeting, XA.net can target (with your permission) the fans of your pages or applications using our system — so definitely let us know if you would like us to do that for you!