For avid Facebook users, you’ve all noticed the ads that are stuck onto the right side of your screen on nearly every page.

What?

You haven’t noticed them? Well, they are there. Go check it out for yourself and come back.

See. I told you they were there. Don’t feel bad if you didn’t notice them. You’re in good company. Most people don’t notice them. Like many forms of banner ads, they are simply ignored and since they are relatively new to Facebook and people are very focused while on the site, this is even more true. Of course, you may have checked and found that there are no ads on Facebook for you. Congratulations. You’re in good company again along with the millions who use browser plugins to disable all of these ads (myself included).

Oh, yes, people don’t click on them much either. Check out the results from several campaigns I’ve done on Facebook as experiments. The bolded line at the bottom is the aggregate. These campaigns ranged from very broad to highly targeted, but the results are the same…pretty lousy clickthrough rates. (PS: if you’re thinking about advertising on Facebook, lean towards paying per click versus per impression…no one’s going to click on them, so you should be fine.)

0.074% clickthrough rate. Not 7%. Zero-point-zero-seven percent. Not even a measly half a percent.

I think Facebook knows that this isn’t great and they’re trying to make up for this in a couple of ways. First, price. For all of these campaigns combined, I spent around $200. That’s not going to bankrupt anyone and that got me 614,000 impressions. That’s about $3 per 1000 impressions. Not horrible. Per click, however, I spent about $0.43, which isn’t go great seeing as I probably could have done A LOT better doing paid search on Google.

The second way that Facebook is trying to help advertisers (and users), is by ensuring that only quality ads are shown. Google does this as well by adding in a “quality score” to determine which paid search ads occupy the first couple of positions. You can’t just outright buy the first paid search spot. Over time, if no one ever clicks on your ad, it’ll start to fall regardless of what you bid for the keyword. This is good for users. It’s also good for advertisers. Yes, it makes their job a bit harder because they have to make more relevant ads, but they should have been doing this in the first place. So, even if they have to be somewhat forced into making more relevant ads, it still works out.

The way Facebook helps force advertisers to make better ads is through their rating system. Take a look at a selection of ads that recently appeared on my page:

As you can see, they’re all thrilling and well-targeted to me. Just a quick look through and what do I see? First, in ad #1, I can apparently become a timber wolf  judging by the color of this “person’s” eyes. Good news in ad #2, I’m this close to being a filmmaker, which I’ll just call a good fall back job for me if this whole marketing thing doesn’t pan out. And ad #3 features one of my most annoying activities of the Internet, “Mafia Wars.” If you’ve got a Facebook account, you’ve been invited to play this “game.” This is a blocked application for me (yet, I still get the ad for it).

Bottom line: nothing terribly relevant even though Facebook’s ad creation tool let’s you target the ads to point that literally only a handful of people would see it if you so chose. Between selecting for age range, network, location, and keywords, you can target these ads to an almost frightening degree.  But all this targeting apparently doesn’t matter based on clickthrough rates I’ve seen.

Okay, so back to how Facebook “forces” advertisers to make better ads and the point of today’s post. You’ll notice at the bottom of each ad is a thumbs up and the word “Like.” In the upper-right of each ad is an “X,” which is positioned just like the “X” in Windows programs. Here’s how it works…if you click the “Like,” then presumably the ad get some additional quality score, which might make it show up higher on the page (just like Google’s paid search quality score) and you might get more ads with a similar demographic target. What’s missing is a “Hate” or “Dislike” option, but the “X” actually serves that function. If you click the “X” to close the ad, Facebook wants to know why and gives you this pop-up:

As you can see, the “X” is basically serving as a “Dislike,” but you’ve got to be “in the know” in order to know about this (and now you are). Many people have complained about this feature and would rather see a “Dislike” button (myself included). There’s even a Facebook Fan Page called “Facebook, give us a dislike button” with more than 550,000 fans. It’s basically a petition to Facebook demanding this feature. Facebook isn’t known for being very responsive to its users demands, so this might happen, but only if Facebook decides on its own that it’s necessary.

Of course, Facebook, like many other media properties, wants to protect it’s advertisers. Presumably, if you give people a “dislike” button, then when people click it there needs to be some sort of repercussion. Perhaps with enough “dislikes” the ad has to be pulled permanently or the advertiser has to pay more to have it placed. Advertisers don’t like this idea, so their collective power puts companies like Facebook in a tough spot. Make the users happy by allowing them to get rid of the worst ads or make the advertisers (who pay the bills) happy by allowing them to put up any ad they want. You can’t have both. Right now, Facebook has the latter.

I don’t mean to pick on Facebook, as they aren’t the only media property with this dilemma and very few have given any sort of real power to the users to control the ads they see. But, imagine if they did. Imagine if this were required. That’s right, everywhere that your ad appears online, there are also “Like” and “Dislike” buttons. Those ads with the most “Likes” get shown more often and the advertiser pays less and those with the most “Dislikes” get shown less often and the advertisers pay more. The question for media properties then becomes: “can I afford to only have “liked” ads on my site?” That is, if advertisers pay less if people like their ads, will the media properties make enough money? Do they need the cash from the “Disliked” ads just to keep the lights on? To answer the question: “can I afford to?” my answer is “Can you afford not to?” People are already looking for (and finding) ways to block all these ads anyway, so why not increase the chances that they don’t block them by actually making them good?

What’s that you say? It’s not possible to make a banner ad that people want to see? Try this one on for size:

Told you so. There are ads that people want to see. The ad for Pringles you see (and probably clicked a bunch of times) was even the winner of the Gold Cyber Lion at the Cannes Advertising Festival this past year. It’s the highest honor you can get for digital work…and it was a banner ad. Fair balance, my company, Bridge Worldwide, created that banner for Pringles (we are the digital agency of record for the brand). [Read my post: "What Pharma Can Learn from Pringles" to hear more about how this ad applies to pharma]

Question: how many “likes” versus “dislikes” would the Pringles ad have gotten? To give you a clue, after the award was announced, a link to a demo of the ad showed up on several social media sites including Buzzfeed, reddit, and many others. It was all over Twitter to the point that the link to view the ad (click to see it in a page) was the 4th most tweeted link on Twitter that day. More than 200,000 people came to see the ad in 2 days…on purpose. That is, they went out of their way to see an ad. Can your ads do that?

Of course, not every ad can be “Can Hands” and certainly it wouldn’t be appropriate for healthcare, but the point remains that our ads don’t have to be mind-numbingly boring and distracting to users. The don’t have to be so bad that people just want them to disappear.

So, here are some current pharma banner ads. Unfortunately, I don’t have the animated versions (only the Premarin one has actual animation, the rest have “scrolling” fair balance only), but I can assure you that it doesn’t add much. Which would you “like” and which would you “dislike”? PS: You don’t have to “like” any of them.

The Premarin Banner (with the cloud) at least has some animation, albeit odd and “icky” animation.

I’ll just leave it at that rather than ask a lot of questions about what purple rain has to do with vaginal dryness.

So, which did you give a “like” vote to and which did you give a “dislike” vote to? I’m going to guess that none of them got a “like” vote, which would indicate you’d like to see more of a particular ad. I’d further guess that just about every ad here would have gotten a “dislike.” So, if we implemented a system where only “liked” ads are shown prominently and repeatedly and “disliked” ads were show less often and in less obvious positions, these pharma companies would be paying a lot more to advertise their products.

Sadly, there isn’t a system like this in place now…or is there? There is, of course, a de facto voting system already. If people like your ad, they’ll click on it. That’s a “like.” If people don’t like  your ad, they won’t click on it. That’s a “dislike.” So, how are your click rates?  Is the media property or your media buying agency telling you that your rates are good? Do you think they’re good? How many times did you click on the Pringles banner? Granted, I called attention to it, so more people clicked on it than might have in the “real world.” However, I didn’t make you click it twice or, say, all 97 times (you did make it to the end, right?).

People are voting on your ads. Not just your banner ads either. Your paid search ads, your TV ads, and print too. They’re also voting on the “advertising” your reps deliver to doctors and your marketing at conventions or conferences. People are always voting on your marketing. The question is: are you listening to how they’re voting? Are you making change s based on these “votes”? Maybe you’re just continuing as if you’re completely unaware that these votes exist.  Eventually, the voters will have their say and you might not like who they pick.

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. What Pharma Can Learn from Pringles
2. Pharma Company of the Year in Social Media — Dosie Awards
3. Follow Your Customers’ Path to Success