Covario, a search marketing agency, ran a campaign for Intel on paid search and on Facebook in seven countries, including the United States.

They found that on a dollar-for-dollar basis Facebook and Google performed the same. However, when the budget was ramped up by 10 times, the statistics didn’t degrade for Facebook in any way. For 10 times the spend, they delivered 10 times the results.

In fact they saw 100 times the impressions delivered on Facebook as delivered through paid search on Google, Yahoo, and Bing during the campaign run. The key point is that the inventory available on Facebook is huge, its global, and its growing.

So where should the budget for Facebook campaigns come from?

In 2011 Covario’s clients are planning on major budget increases for Facebook advertising. They estimate that advertisers are planning to spend between 10% and 20% of their pay-per-click (PPC) budgets on Facebook.

This budget is not coming out of PPC. It’s coming from display or offline budgets, or as an incremental override to the overall digital budget, specifically increasing the shift toward digital more aggressively.

Facebook has passed the tipping point. Search is still performing. Facebook is performing too — better than display and comparable to search. Facebook is delivering truly big time inventory, at comparable pricing to PPC, and with display-like CTRs.

Is your company still wondering whether it’s worthwhile advertising on Facebook?

Full story at Search Engine Watch »

Data from the comScore Ad Metrix online advertising intelligence service indicated that nearly 1.3 trillion display ads were delivered to U.S. Internet users during the third quarter, marking a 22-percent increase versus year ago.

Facebook led all online publishers in Q3 2010 with 297 billion display ad impressions, representing 23.1 percent market share. Facebook’s market share has increased 13.9 percentage points from 9.2 percent in Q3 2009.

Yahoo! Sites ranked second during the most recent quarter with 140 billion impressions (11.0 percent), followed by Microsoft Sites with 64 billion impressions (5.0 percent) and Fox Interactive Media with 48 billion impressions (3.8 percent).

The average U.S. Internet user was delivered more than 6,000 display ads over the course of the quarter.

Does your marketing strategy include Facebook advertising?

It is actually not as expensive as you might think. Yesterday, I set up a campaign to promote Marketing Munch, and I estimate that it should only cost about $97 to reach approximately 1,381,740 male and female Facebook users, aged 25 to 50, based in the United States, who have indicated they like or are interested in advertising, marketing, etc.

I made an initial bid of $0.15 CPM, despite Facebook’s suggested bid of $0.33 to $0.53.

So far the ad has generated 43,415 impressions, for $2.88, at an average CPM of $0.07. The ad has attracted 3 clicks, a click-through rate of 0.01%, at an average cost-per-click (CPC) of $0.96.

Now, $0.96 CPC may look expensive, depending on your marketing goals. I prefer to look beyond just the CPC.

I think of Facebook advertising as display advertising, like in a newspaper or magazine, except it’s way more targeted. If you advertise in your local newspaper, how much are you pay for every 1,000 ad impressions? Certainly, no where near as low as $0.07 CPM.

Of course, it might take 5, 10, or even 100 ad impressions for the ad to make an impression on every Facebook user who might be interested in my blog. I still consider that good value when you compare it to other forms of display advertising.

Full story at comScore »