Facebook Engagement Ads –Consumer Engagement redefined

I recently got a call from one of our clients congratulating me on the official facebook launch in Nigeria. We spoke for a while about his ongoing internet campaign and at the end of the conversation, I heard the funniest thing. He said to me “so it’s now www.facebook.com.ng”, and I said oh no it isn’t, it’s still www.facebook.com. He was a bit confused and then asked me what the whole launch event was about, and then it struck me that there must be so many people just like him that do not know the true meaning of what took place on that day.

With the new facebook layout change came some other changes on the site, some immediately visible, and others not so visible. Facebook took down the former skyscraper ads and introduce the new Facebook Engagement Ads.

Engagement ads are designed to integrate naturally within the user’s experience on Facebook . With Engagement ads, when a user clicks the ad, he isn’t taken away to a web page out of Facebook, but can interact and leave comments and can generate social stories in Feed. The ads allow your brand to share and connect with users on their home page without leaving Facebook and their social network.

Facebook Video Engagement Ads

The Facebook Video Engagement Ad allows users to leave inline comments on the video without leaving the home page. When a user comments on a Video Engagement Ad, the comments are visible to their entire friend list. What’s more, users can also “like” and/or become a fan of the brand inline, without interrupting the video. There is the Video engagement ads which allows you to see your friends who ‘liked’ the ad thereby increasing the likelihood of you watching our trusting the product.

A Sample Video Engagement Ad

Event Engagement Ads

Another interesting engagement ad on Facebook is the Event ads. I will definitely click on one of these if people network or my friends are attending an event. I don’t want to get left out.

The ad expands to invite friends to the event when one of the 3 RSVP options are selected. Friends who are attending the event are listed within the ad unit, as well as the total number of Facebook attendees. This increases the trust and likelihood of the user to engage in the ad. The act of RSVP-ing to the event is public and may appear in friends’ home pages. After RSVP-ing to the event, the user has the option to become a fan of the brand.

Marketers can use the Event ads to promote events through viral invites and user interaction.

A Sample Event Engagement Ad

Fan Engagement Ads

The Facebook Fan Engagement Ads allow users to interact with the ads in the profile and newsfeeds –without leaving their Facebook page, thus increasing interaction, social spread, and brand engagement.

If the user’s friends are already Fans of the brand, the ad unit provides social context. This endorsement increases both the user’s trust in the brand and the likelihood that the user will engage with the ad unit and become a Fan themselves.

If none of the user’s friends are currently Fans of the brand, the ad unit displays the Page’s total fan count at that time. This number assures the user that they are becoming a Fan of a popular page that is of value to many other Facebook users.

A Sample Fan Engagement Ad

Gift Engagement Ads

Brands can now create virtual items that fans can share and send to each other. This engagement ad is suitable for consumer products and entertainment.

The ad unit expands to include a message field when the recipient field is clicked on. Send a message along with the gift, all inline. Messages previously exchanged between a user’s friends are seen below the ad, increasing the trust and likelihood of the user to also engage in the ad. These comments are public and can appear on friends’ home pages in the Stream.

A Sample Gift Engagement Ad

Poll Engagement Ads

The ad unit asks a question with 2 or 3 responses. When the user selects a response, the poll results appear. These results reflect the answers of all Facebook users who have answered the poll. The user can also click to see how their friends voted or become a fan of the brand. When the poll ad is created, it generates a Wall story on the poll’s Page, which can publish into its Fans’ home page Streams. When a user engages with the ad, the poll story can appear on the user’s Wall and friends’ home pages.

The poll engagement ads can be used for market research so before a new product, design or initiative is introduced, a company can run the poll engagement ads to sample the audience opinion. These ads can be served to over a million people across Facebook. Targeting is involved, it could be served to Nigerians e.g between the ages of 18-35 or 30-40. From the result, he would know if he should pull the plugs or go ahead with the new products.

A Sample Poll Engagement Ad

Facebook Self Served Ads

Facebook self served ads appear throughout the site, but not on the home page. The self served ads can be booked by anybody that wants to publicize their product or events. Of course these ads don’t have any engagement features and usually have a lower click through rate than the engagement ads. The engagement ads gives more mileage to a product and its premium.

Sample Self Served Ads

Internet Marketing and Small businesses

I attended the Google day Nigeria workshop for internet marketers last week and it was a very interesting session. The Google team explained how small and medium businesses can use its products like Adwords, AdSense, Analytics and Blogger to promote their businesses online with little initial investment. These platforms are very important for SMEs especially in Nigeria.

The Google VP Engineering EMEA Nelson Mattos and his team had earlier that week visited the store of one of our small spenders who had an amazing story of how Wild Fusion used Google marketing platform to transformed her small business forever. This was interesting case study for the Google team and Wild Fusion and basically this is how it goes.

Last year Wild Fusion decided to offer services to SMEs and small spenders who couldn’t afford inventories on the "big sites". We reached out to a few SMEs in Ikoyi and we met Mrs Funke of BabyM store www.babymafrica.com at Dolphin Estate Plaza. She didn’t understand what Google platform could do for her baby store or better still how digital marketing could help her. For months we kept coming back and one day she finally decided to give it a try once our team assured her of money back guarantee.

She could only afford $400 or about N50,000 and with a very simple website of about 4 pages and a feedback form we got to work. On Google search, anyone searching with keywords baby, maternity, pregnancy, baby names, kindergarten, paediatric etc were served with her sponsored ads (inorganic listing) and others could see her display ads based on what sites they were browsing (all ads were geo-targeted to Nigerians ).


Google VP Engineering EMEA Nelson Mattos, Isis(Google Kenya) and Anat (Head of Marketing , Africa) listen to Funke's success story


As a result interested people completed forms on her website and this was auto-emailed to her with the contact details of the visitor. She followed them up and in about a month of the campaign, she had hundreds of enquiries and requests. She emailed, called and followed up these prospective buyers and they came to her little store from different parts of the country to order till she ran out of stock. Last week she told us she had sold out and we should discontinue the campaign as she ran out of stock and some customers had already put down some money for the next set of baby clothes. Of course she didn’t demand any money back.

For those of you who were not at the workshop, you can continue reading and learn how Adwords works.
Google Adwords is an internet advertising system that uses search advertising alongside contextual targeting to place ads beside natural search results and websites on the internet. Ok, so I started out with just Google Adwords and now I have mentioned search advertising and contextual targeting and I’m sure you're wondering hey where’s all this coming from. Just take a break, relax and let me take you through it all.

Now we all know Google is the largest search engine in the world and we all use Google to find information about so many different things. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably used the Google search engine to search for stuff and found information on what you were looking for. One thing that you may or may not have noticed is that beside the Google natural search results are sponsored links that are also related to your search query. The sponsored links appear either on top or to the left of the natural search results and that’s what I’m going to talk about.


Google Vice President EMEA Nelson Mattos listens to Mrs Funke’s story on how Google Adwords transformed her little business


The sponsored links area contains text ads which are basically made up of a catchy headline, a body of text and a display url. Another thing you may be wondering now is why do the ads in the sponsored links show when you search for something and I’ll tell you but before that let me break down a few terms. The words or phrase you type in the Google search box to be searched is called a search query, and keywords make up a search query. When you use Google Adwords to advertise, you select keywords that are relevant to your business and tell Google that if any of the keywords you select are in a users search query, then your ad should be shown in the sponsored links area, basically that’s how it works.

So if you are a travel agency, you might want your ads to show to users who are searching for travel tickets. Now one very good feature of Adwords is that you can geo target. What this means is that if you do business in Nigeria and you cannot offer your services outside Nigeria, Adwords allows you to specify that your ads should only show if your keyword matches a search query of users only from Nigeria, cool isn’t it.

Yeah, I had mentioned earlier that Adwords uses contextual targeting alongside search advertising. With contextual targeting as the name suggests, your ads are placed on websites that have the same context as the keywords you choose. Let me break that down a little bit. Let’s say you sell cars, and you’ve chosen keywords relevant to cars and automobiles. Now when Google looks through you keywords, they will show your ad on a webpage where cars are the central theme thus making your ad more relevant to the user. With contextual targeting, you have a choice of using the text ads mentioned earlier or image ads which can be a combination of texts and images and maybe your company logo. Google also has image ad templates that enable you easily create image ads effortlessly.

Internet advertising is a great way for small and medium businesses to engage customers with the right message at every stage of the buying cycle and unlike traditional advertising doesn’t cost a fortune. So if you want to try it out today you know where to go.


Funke tells her story to the Google team.