There has been a buzz around the interwebs about Facebook ads not being very effective. Veritasium released mechanism. Derek Muller, owner of Veritasium’s YouTube channel, experimented with Facebook’s ads on a random page about cats.

Derek argues that since there are a lot of fake accounts on Facebook, thanks to click farms around the world, when Facebook sends out ads to your chosen audience, most of these sponsored stories end up in the News Feed of fake accounts. As the number of spamming fans grows on your page, your engagement rate slows down, forcing you to buy another ad campaign from Facebook to increase interaction with users.

Facebook has attempted to remove fake accounts and continues to monitor the social network for spammers but Derek highlights that Facebook does not delete the fake likes even if the account gets deleted.

He goes on to explain why he thinks the likes he received on his cat page were fake:

“OK, here’s the thing. The global average “likes” per person is 40. For most countries it looks like 20 and below. Virtually everyone who liked my page liked in excess of 900 things (I say virtually because I could only spot-check random profiles and then the number of likes is not easy to ascertain – you have to scroll for miles through their likes and then count using a query of the code). These are clearly not typical accounts.”

So Derek argues that with paid advertising, you can’t be sure that you’re reaching out to genuine fans. And if you’re not, it can be a big problem since it weighs on your standing within the News Feed algorithm.

Here are a few tips we have for marketers with Facebook pages:

1. Building Your Brand

Many people confuse the function of Facebook by using it to create a brand. Facebook is a great tool for helping you get the word out and develop your brand, but you must realize that your branding and marketing strategy should be the source for your Facebook strategy. To build your brand on Facebook, start with campaigns. Instead of throwing out a status update or a random photo every day, begin a one-month campaign to test out the productivity of Facebook’s marketing.

Running a campaign with one clear message would ensure that your brand remains on track online, as well as that it targets customers who really want to hear from you.

2. Organic Reach

Initially, start off without paid advertising. Don’t ask your friends to like your Facebook page if they are not interested in your brand. These uninterested likes will only create problems for you later. Keep it genuine from day one so that Facebook can deliver the right Insights to you and so that Facebook’s Insights can help you shape your future strategies.

Instead of nagging your peers to “like” your page and posts, target the right people, right when they are ready to hear and understand you.

3. Monitor Engagement Rate

Keep a watchful eye on your page statistics. Add fast-growing pages in your “Pages to Watch” tab so you can benchmark your page’s performance. Note any suspicious activity or like. If someone has liked your page, but hasn’t interacted in quite a long time, reach out to them.

For a Facebook page that has millions of fans, it gets very unpractical, so make sure that you start with genuine fans from the get-go.

Be Proactive:

Facebook is undoubtedly the largest social network there ever was and is growing day by day through new features and acquisitions. Since most of our customers are now checking their Facebook accounts more than once a day, it has become a go-to medium for digital marketers. However, if you think there are problems with Facebook’s paid advertising, you need to have checks and balances in place to ensure that you keep your customers engaged – genuinely.

What do you think? Is Facebook paid advertising worth your money?

Nabiha Zeeshan is a curious social media addict who loves to explore the human nature. She watches movies to learn and enjoys TEDx talks and Seth Godin’s blog posts. She is currently working as a social media strategist at at Globus, Dubai UAE. You can tweet to her @NabihaZeeshan.

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developers Kenshoo, and Nanigans announced at South By Southwest that they will integrate their technology with the Oracle Social Cloud. The news comes as part of Oracle’s new API-based paid social media solution.

SHIFT CEO James Borow commented on what this means for both his company and Oracle:

We are proud to work with Oracle for the launch of its new paid media solution. We believe paid media is the most important element in any marketing strategy, as it enables marketers to reach customers with a tailored and targeted message. This integration will provide Oracle customers the ability to execute large-scale advertising campaigns across social platforms efficiently and effectively. We look forward to working with current and future Oracle customers to help maximize their brand marketing ROI.

Kenshoo Senior Vice President of Business Development Sivan Metzger commented on this partnership in a press release:

Savvy marketers understand the complementary nature of engaging content and paid social media, as well as the need to employ a diverse set of tactics to achieve their specific goals. Kenshoo’s advanced tracking and attribution capabilities, bidding algorithms, and workflow automation, can provide advertisers with the ability to quickly and easily create, manage and optimize their social media marketing campaigns while intelligently leveraging content they create to boost results. Collaborating with a well-respected brand like Oracle offers us a unique opportunity to share these tools with best-of-breed clientele and help marketers achieve their business goals through holistic social optimization.

Nanigans CEO Ric Calvillo discussed how Nanigans technology can perfectly complement Oracle’s:

Working with Oracle Social Cloud is another clear illustration of our growth and focus to provide in-house performance marketers and agencies with the most advanced SaaS platform across the social and mobile landscape. Oracle is perfectly aligned with Nanigans at the enterprise level and we look forward to further solidifying our position within the market through this partnership.

Image courtesy of .

If you’re near Luleå, Sweden, you could witness the first Facebook data center being built using a new kind of architecture.

Rapid deployment data center design (RDDC) is a new kind of building concept from Open Compute Project, an industry-wide coalition of technology companies that is creating cost and energy efficient designs and sharing them for free under an open source model. This new design idea that will allow Facebook to expand its capacity twice as fast. The concept was discussed during the Open Compute Summit in January. This will be the second data center building in Luleå, but the first using this new architecture.

This new approach to data center design will enable Facebook to construct and deploy new capacity twice as fast at its previous approach. It will be much more site-agnostic and reduce the amount of of materials used during construction.

The RDDC concept for Facebook began with a hack. In October 2012, Open Compute’s data center strategic engineering and development team and several construction experts came together to hack on a design for a data center that would look less like a construction project and more like a manufactured product. From this hack, a couple of core ideas for streamlining and simplifying the build process emerged.

The first idea developed during the hack was using pre-assembled steel frames. This concept is similar to that of a car on a chassis, where the frame is built and components are attached via an assembly line. In this model, cable trays, power bus ways, containment panels, and even lighting are preinstalled in a factory.

The second idea was Ikea-inspired flat-pack assemblies. Instead of creating a data center where all the weight is carried by the roof, Open Compute sought to develop a concept where the walls of a data center would be paneled to fit into standard modules that would be easily transportable to a site, much like an Ikea bookshelf fits neatly into one box.

Construction on the Luleå data center is expect to being soon using RDDC designs.

Not long after Facebook , the company is letting marketers and page admins know that there will be a for Facebook pages.

This will not roll out immediately, though some page admins might have this new design today. Facebook noted that this will roll out throughout the course of the week.

What’s changing?

The right-side column of the timeline will show all the page’s posts. All posts will appear consistently, in one line, as it does on a person’s timeline and on News Feed. The left-side column will hold information about the page or business, including a map, hours of operation, phone number, website URL, photos and videos. Key indicators, such as ads running, likes, post reach and unread notifications will be in a bar off to the right of the posts.

What does this mean for marketers?

Facebook says that these changes will help make it easier for page admins to find information they need. There will also be a feature in the Page Insights tool for admins, allowing marketers to keep tabs on pages similar to their own (or competitors) and track those pages’ performances.

Here’s a look at how Pages to Watch will look within the Page Insights feature.

Custom tabs will be in the “more” button, according to a Facebook spokesperson.

While cover photos will stay the same size, marketers may need to refresh their creatives as the page name and category appear on the cover photo in white text and the profile picture sits a bit higher.

Facebook explained the new layout :

No matter where you are on your Page, you can now view information about the ads you’re running and new likes on your Page, as well unread notifications and messages. You can click on any section in the This Week section for more detail.

We’ve also added new navigation options to the top of the Page, making it easier to access your activity, insights and settings. The Build Audience menu at the top of the Page offers direct access to your Ads Manager account.

Page admins: What do you think of the new design?

When King, the makers of the hugely-popular Candy Crush Saga, filed for an IPO last month, there was no shortage of speculation about the company’s sustainability. Even though the game maker racked up $1.88 billion in revenue last year (largely relying on Candy Crush Saga), there were some worrying signs already. Besides the troubling performances of other social-gaming companies like Zynga, King saw its revenue decline by about $20,000 between Q3 and Q4 of last year, while its profits declined by over $70,500 in the same time period.

User interest is still going strong, according to Mediabistro’s research tool, AppData. Candy Crush Saga continues to enjoy phenomenal growth, withFaceook  monthly active users (MAUs) up 490 percent this year. Daily active users (DAUs) are up 570 percent this year. Even better news for the company is that DAU/MAU engagement has gone up 5 percent in the same time period, showing that more users are playing the game on a daily basis.

Troubling signs still portend. Besides the decline in revenue and profits, the company relies on Candy Crush Saga for 78 percent of its revenue. The game’s Facebook page has seen a significant decrease in engagement recently, losing almost 50,000  in the past week. Though the page has maintained consistent growth in likes it looks like that is starting to plateau as well. Check out this chart, courtesy of PageData:

It’s worth noting that other games by the company, Pet Rescue Saga and Farm Heroes Saga, are topping AppData’s MAU leaderboard for this week:

For more information about Mediabistro’s research tools, click here for AppData or here for PageData. You can also call .

What do you think about King’s planned IPO? Is social gaming a sustainable business?

This post originally appeared on our sister blog, SocialTimes.

At South by Southwest in Austin, that Facebook will hold another F8 conference — April 30 in San Francisco. This is the first F8 since 2011, where Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg .

The conference will be held at the San Francisco Design Concourse.

Sukhar offered more details in a blog post:

This year, we’re going back to our roots with a developer-focused conference. We will open with a morning keynote, followed by four technical tracks. These tracks will cover everything you need to know about building on the Facebook and Parse platforms, including getting started guides, technical best practices, infrastructure strategies, engineering deep dives, and advertising tips for making your app or game highly successful. We’ll also have special sessions dedicated to exploring how developers can take advantage of open source technologies.

Facebook and Parse engineers and product team members will be available during the conference to provide one-on-one help and advice, and you’ll also have the opportunity to learn from each other throughout the day. We’ll close out the day with a celebration for attendees to unwind with drinks and entertainment.

Readers: What do you think Facebook will launch or announce at F8?

As more and more people talk about current events on Facebook, developers within the media industry are looking for some way to join the conversation. So to offer companies a solution into the data behind on the social network, the launch of Public Content Solutions.

(PCS) offers support and resources to partners using Facebook’s Public Feed API and Keyword Insights API. Partners who take part in PCS will receive a badge to display, as well as support from the PCS team and access to Facebook’s Media Partnerships team. Initial partners in the PCS program include Arktan, telescope, never.no, Timeline Labs, Tagboard, Vizrt, Reality Check and SnappyTV.

Facebook Partner Engineer Manager Bob Morgan introduced PCS in a blog post:

Whenever something important happens in the world – from the Sochi Olympics to the crisis in the Ukraine to the results of the Oscars – people immediately take to Facebook to discuss it. With more than a billion people using Facebook and engaging in real-time conversations during these moments, it’s important for us to work closely with media companies to help them tell these stories.

In the past year, we’ve launched a series of products and resources – like our  – to help partners leverage the massive amounts of data and content associated with these events. As a result, we’re seeing tremendous innovation coming from amazing partners in this space, such as data analysis and visualizations, intelligent curation of popular photos, videos and posts, fan voting and polling tools, broadcast and venue integrations and much more.

Readers: What do you think about PCS?

Perfect Audience, a Facebook Exchange partner, announced the launch of a new product this week called Perfect Product Retargeting, a solution that allows retailers with Google Merchant Accounts to plug in directly to Facebook Exchange.

With this new solution, online retailers with Google Merchant Center accounts can easily transform their product listings into personalized retargeting campaigns on Facebook Exchange (FBX) that perform 200-300 percent better than static ads according tests with about 50 retailers.

Brad Flora, CEO of Perfect Audience, said in a press release:

Personalized retargeting is truly the holy grail for online retailers. Online retailers end up wasting time and money on clunky solutions that require a lot of setup and ongoing maintenance. We’ve built a simple, transparent, fully automated solution that gives total control to marketers at both brands and agencies. We’re offering dynamic retargeting in the News Feed for marketers of all sizes.

Perfect Product Retargeting is free to set up, 100 percent self-service for small businesses and has no minimum spend requirements. The ads are personalized down to the product level and can appear on desktop in the Facebook right-hand side or News Feed.

Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer  announced recently that Phil Fernandez, the chairman and CEO of Marketo Inc., has joined the company’s board of directors.

Fernandez said in a press release:

As I’ve watched Gigya evolve over the years, it has become clear to me that this company has an incredible opportunity in its hands. Patrick (Salyer) and his team have built a strong and sustainable business by helping marketers gain a better understanding of their users through first-party data and I think they are well-positioned to dominate the market.

Fernandez, who co-founded the cloud-based marketing software company, will act as a trusted advisor to Gigya and help inform decisions regarding corporate strategy, product development, go-to-market plans and client services.

With more than 30 years of experience building and running high-growth technology companies, Fernandez was president and COO of Epiphany and previously COO at Red Brick Systems. He is the author of the book Revenue Disruption (Wiley, 2012), and is a well-known writer and speaker on topics related to digital marketing, marketing automation, and entrepreneurialism.

Patrick Salyer, CEO of Gigya, welcomed Fernandez:

Having Phil join our board is invaluable to Gigya. He has a tremendous track record of success building large, successful and independent companies. Bringing him onto our board provides us with direct access to one of Silicon Valley’s most influential and visionary leaders.

Bored and looking for something to do with your Facebook friends? Now (for some users, at least) the site  within the Facebook chat module.

As noticed by Inside Facebook reader Matteo Gamba, users who have the chat bar can click “Show Games,” when they click the settings button. This will then show games the user plays, as well as suggested games.

Here’s what happens when the Show Games button is clicked:

Readers: Have you seen this?

 

In the coming weeks, to the News Feed design it . More users will be switched from the old News Feed design, with a white background, to a mobile-inspired News Feed with bigger images and a darker background. There is no change to the News Feed algorithm; this is just for aesthetics.

Facebook said in a blog post that it is doing this to create more consistency in the experience :

You may recall that last year we  for desktop and mobile. People who tested it told us that they liked the bigger photos and images, but found it more difficult to navigate Facebook overall. The updated design has the best of both worlds: it keeps the layout and navigation people liked, but offers bigger images and photos, as well as a new font. The current design on mobile remains the same.

Facebook also stressed that this does not change recommended image size:

Requirements for creative specs and image aspect ratios for ads have not changed. Also, this update does not affect how you buy and optimize ads. You should continue to advertise based on your objectives.

What has changed specifically?

For those with last year’s News Feed test, the tabs to switch between News Feed, Most Recent, and other feeds has switched from the right side of the page to the left side. It can be accessed by clicking the arrow next to “News Feed” on the left sidebar.

The logo for birthdays have also changed, and it looks like Facebook may be going with a darker shade of blue for the Graph Search bar.

Readers: What do you think?

AppsFlyer, a Facebook mobile measurement partner, has raised a $7.1 million A Round from Pitango Venture Capital and from its current investor Magma Venture Partners.

AppsFlyer is now monitoring mobile campaigns at an annual run rate of $500 million in mobile ad spend. During 2013, The company’s mobile traffic grew 80x, and is currently tracking at a run rate of one billion mobile app installs annually.

The new funding will be used to expand research & development, product offering, business development, and customer support. In addition, the money will support the company’s international growth, AppsFlyer officially opens new offices in New York City, San Francisco and Beijing.

Oren Kaniel, AppsFlyer CEO and co-founder said in a press release:

AppsFlyer’s NativeTrack technology is rapidly becoming the industry standard for mobile attribution, and the additional funding will help us scale globally. AppsFlyer is an unbiased, independent measurement platform, and we’re thrilled to have Pitango join us, given their strong portfolio of mobile, social and advertising technology companies.

Using app tracking and campaign analytics SaaS platform, AppsFlyer allows app developers, brands and agencies to measure mobile user acquisition across all media sources including paid, organic, viral and social.

Not much has been said about since Facebook purchased the advertising suite from Microsoft last year. However, a new partnership with cloud-based cross-platform advertising company Flite could help Facebook advertisers deliver better results off the site.

Flite announced Wednesday that the company has partnered with Atlas to offer customers an innovative new solution for display advertising. The Flite Design Studio, which specializes in real-time content advertising, will be integrated into Atlas’ ad-server solution.

Here’s what the partnership means for digital advertisers:

• Seamless integration between Flite’s creative studio and Atlas’s ad server and analytics
• Multi-screen support with HTML5 ads that work across both mobile and desktop environments
• The ability to easily stream dynamic and social content—including videos, Facebook, Twitter, image galleries, and more—into ads
• Live updates to ads without having to retraffic tags
• Comprehensive reporting, including deep engagement metrics

Flite CEO Will Price and Vice President of Engineering Toshinari Kureha talked with Inside Facebook about the impact that this partnership will have on Flite, Atlas, Facebook and Facebook advertisers.

Flite works with some of the top brands all over the world — such as Forbes, Conde Nast, Kellogg’s and Shell — on real-time, content-based marketing.

Now, advertisers who use Atlas have access to Flite’s Design Studio HTML5, which enables advertisers to build HTML5 and Flash ads for desktop  and mobile. This will allow advertisers to build dynamic ads, traffic them through Atlas and capitalize on robust metrics reporting.

Kureha discussed why Atlas is partnering with Flite and what this means for Facebook advertisers who utilize Atlas technology:

One of the reasons why Atlas and Facebook chose us is really our capability where you can pull in content in real time, as well as the ability to do what we call agile marketing, where you just pull in information that you need in real time and push it out there.

Price, who told Inside Facebook that Atlas’ goal is to build an industry-leading third-party ad server, commented on the partnership in a press release:

We’re excited to bring Flite’s creative studio to Atlas’s robust trafficking and analytics platform for advertisers. The integrated offering empowers marketers to embrace the most effective approaches, including real-time marketing, for delivering engaging, content-rich digital advertising for a multi-screen world.

 Erik Johnson, Head of Atlas, welcomed Flite’s contributions:

Our partnership with Flite combines Atlas’ ad serving and comprehensive analytics with Flite’s innovate, rich ad formats and creative tools. Working together will allow our clients and agencies to employ richer ad experiences as well as streamline both workflow and operations.  We look forward to working with Flite to drive value to the advertiser, agency, and ultimately the ecosystem.

While Facebook is rapidly developing experiences for iOS and Android, the platform often gets short shrift. The company is changing that, announcing Wednesday that Facebook Messenger has launched for Windows Phone.

Here’s a list of features in the first version of Messenger for Windows Phone:

• Get to all your messages without having to open Facebook.
• Bring your conversations to life with stickers and send photos privately.
• Have group conversations and make plans on the go.
• Share your location so people know when you’re nearby.
• Know when people have seen your messages.
• See who’s using Messenger and who’s active on Facebook.
• Stay logged in so you never miss a message.
• Turn off notifications when you’re working, sleeping or just need a break.
• Never lose your conversation history or contacts.

Early reviews are positive, as the app already has roughly a 4.5 star rating among users.

Readers: If you have a , are you excited?

Facebook ads have come a long way in a few short years. The days of a brand posting a blurry photo from an event with a caption “Like Us Now!” are (thankfully) coming to an end. Through numerous algorithm changes, Facebook has made it clear to marketers that it wants – and its users expect – a compelling, visually appealing reason to engage with a brand’s ad.

This means that marketers need to jettison generic ad creative and text-heavy wall posts in favor of high-quality, engaging ad creative with smart imagery and limited text. Facebook will reward them for doing so with greater exposure in users’ News Feeds.

Here are five creative best practices marketers can use to generate higher performance from their Facebook ads:

1. Use the News Feed how it’s really meant to be used

No, it’s not just a giant scrolling RSS feed for BuzzFeed articles. Facebook’s News Feed has evolved into one of marketers’ best digital advertising channels. Here’s why: have placed much higher value on the images brands uses within their wall posts, not just the content. Those images need to represent the type of experience a user will have once they click on your ad.

For example: Instead of showing three to four images within a News Feed ad of what a character arc looks like inside of a mobile game you are advertising, show a screenshot of the user’s experience within the game. Your conversions will be higher if both the ad and landing page it links to give an accurate representation of what the user can expect from your product or service.

2.  Research first, create ad second

Remember how back in the old days of advertising (for sake of argument, let’s say five years ago), you had to actually research your audience, their likes and dislikes, challenges, needs, etc., before you created an ad? And then along came that ridiculous Oreo Super Bowl tweet and all of a sudden the concept of properly understanding your audience went out the window and “real-time” everything was in. Well, it doesn’t quite work that way if you want great performance from Facebook advertising.

Success in the new realm of Facebook advertising (remember: it is now a ) means that marketers need to put more research and focus into the images they use in Facebook ads because the ad size is so large (especially in the News Feed). The relatively short lifespan of a Facebook ad means that brands must have a vast quantity of unique, constantly refreshed images at the ready to keep their ads and content near the top of users’ News Feeds. This is especially true for direct-response advertisers, who must rely on engaging, creative ads to entice a consumer into making a purchasing decision.

Below is an example of the type of text-heavy, image-deficient wall post that Facebook wants marketers to move away from:

Here’s an example of the type of image-based wall post that Facebook wants marketers to use and that will deliver better results for direct-response advertisers:

3.  Stop. Using. Logos. 

Seriously, no one wants to see your brand’s logo splashed all over their News Feed. Logos are boring and take the user’s focus off of the action you want someone to take from viewing your ad. The only people that care about a brand’s logo are the brand.

4. Understand Your Audience’s Demographics 

Facebook offers some great ad targeting tools that can help you tailor your ad creative specifically for the demographic segment you want to target. Its tool gives marketers the ability to target specific users across any device. Lookalike Audiences, a cousin of Custom Audiences, enables advertisers to target new users who are likely interested in the business because they are similar to customers on a list already cultivated. By effectively using (and combining) these tools, you can ensure your ad creative is tailored in such a way that it speaks directly to your specific target audiences. This will increase the performance and user engagement of your Facebook ads, ensuring they remain higher up in users’ News Feeds.

5. Don’t Get Too Cute

The concept of your Facebook ad creative needs to have a singular focus. Your ads shouldn’t have to be studied by silent monks in order to figure out what action you wish a user to take. A Facebook user should be able to glance at the ad and immediately know what it means, what action they are supposed to take and what value they are going to derive from that action.

David Serfaty is Director of Social Advertising at Matomy Media Group, a global performance marketing company. He can be reached at .

Facebook released an update to its news reader Tuesday, allowing users to more easily share the stories via Facebook messages, text or email.

The app has been well-liked among those who use it, earning an overall rating of 4.5 stars (out of 5). However, AppData download estimates show that Paper has fallen flat.

Here’s a look at what else this update of , as noted by the :

• Turn off sound effects and enjoy the silence
• Create stories in languages that use multi-stage input, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean
• Experience other improvements that make Paper even more reliable and—hopefully—that much more fun to use!

We’ll see if these enhancements help, but so far, iPhone users have been slow to download Paper, even with shining reviews. On Feb. 4, one day after release, AppData estimates pegged Paper as the top free social networking app in the U.S. (in terms of downloads). Today? It’s the 28th-most downloaded free social networking app in the U.S., and 285th in terms of U.S. free apps.

Readers: Do you use Paper?

 

According to CNBC, Facebook is in the process of acquiring a drone maker.

Facebook is reportedly buying Titan Aerospace, which builds solar atmospheric satellite platforms, for $60 million. This comes just a couple weeks after Facebook for $19 billion.

Facebook has not yet responded to an email asking for confirmation.

News was first reported by TechCrunch, but CNBC’s sources said Tuesday morning that the deal has been finalized. The airplane satellite machines that Titan makes can stay aloft for 5 years without having to land.

According to reports, this acquisition will help Facebook’s efforts in step with to provide internet access to more people internationally. The drones would ideally be able to provide Wi-Fi or broadband access to areas of the world that are underserved.

Image courtesy of Titan Aerospace.

Facebook began allowing page administrators to add a  to the lower-right-hand corner of page post ads in February. Ever since reports of this feature first surfaced, we were excited about its potential impact and looking forward to testing.

Our digital team at Electronic Merchant Systems has been successful with paid social campaigns in the past. Facebook ads, in particular, have generated approximately 65 percent of online signups for our mobile credit card processing solution, EMS+.

When the call-to-action buttons became available, we believed it would help drive our conversion prices down on a per-ad basis. After running a series of initial tests, however, that hasn’t been the result.

To test this new feature, we kept the ad copy, imagery and targeted audience constant throughout a series of three separate Facebook ads. The first ad we ran did not include a call-to-action button. The next two did, featuring different variations of the messaging options available within Facebook.

We found that the call-to-action button didn’t necessarily hurt our cost-per conversion price but it also did not improve it, either.

Those results are illustrated below.

1.  The first Facebook ad we tested was without a call-to-action button.

The Facebook ad we used, pictured above, was targeted at a potential audience of 1,340,000 people, based on a custom audience similarity file of small business owners in the United States ages 25 and older.

Our goal was to connect with business owners who would ultimately “convert” by completing an online sign up form for EMS+. Shares of this ad, likes, clicks and referrals to our website are obviously great, too, but our digital team is measuring the effectiveness of each ad based primarily on cost per conversion—the cost per completed signup form.

After a 48-hour test, this particular Facebook ad—without the call-to-action—resulted in a cost-per-conversion of $40.

2.  Then we tested this same ad with the call-to-action button “Learn More”

Our next step was running this exact same ad with the call-to-action button “Learn More” to compare. The same ad copy, imagery and custom audience similarity file was otherwise used, as illustrated above.

For those who haven’t tested this feature yet, there are five call-to-action options available in a drop-down menu within Facebook: “Shop Now”, “Learn More”, “Sign Up”, “Book Now” and “Download.”

For our business model, specifically, we believe the two most applicable selections are “Learn More” and “Sign Up.”

We ran this “Learn More,” ad for a similar 48-hour test, spending the exact same dollar value as the previous ad. With this call-to-action version, however, we achieved a cost per conversion of $44.40

We expected this particular ad to be at least better than the cost per conversion of $40 we achieved previously—if not significantly better—but that wasn’t the result.

So we tested again.

3. The next ad we tested included the call-to-action button “Sign Up”

The only difference with this ad was the call-to-action button, “Sign Up,” as pictured above. After a 48-hour test at the same dollar value as the previous ads, our cost per conversion came out at $42.10.

The “Sign Up” version performed slightly better than “Learn More” but still not as good as the original ad without a call-to-action button. That initial ad performed nine percent better in terms of cost per conversion than the “Learn More” ad, and five percent better than “Sign Up.”

Curious as to why the call-to-action button didn’t make the impact we expected, we reached out to 18-year Internet marketing professional Jim Kukral. Jim has been recognized as one of 100 top small business influencers online according to SmallBizTrends.com among other awards and accolades.

“Facebook ads work because they are highly targeted to personal interests and demographics and they are injected directly into the reading experience for each person,” Kukral said. “Also, and most importantly, they aren’t designed to look like ads; but rather “updates”. Perhaps we’re finding out that adding the new call to action buttons tip the viewer off more quickly that they are viewing an advertisement, therein directly affecting the effectiveness of the ad itself. One thing is for sure; the only true way to know is to do proper testing and monitor the results over time.”

As we continue to test and monitor we’ll keep you posted on our findings. In the meantime, let us know if you’ve used call-to-action buttons on Facebook Ads and how it worked for you!

Brendan Bowers is a Content Strategist and Social Media Manager with Electronic Merchant Systems in Cleveland, Ohio. He can be reached via email and Twitter .

It’s understood that is the most popular Facebook game, but by looking at daily active user counts (DAU), it shows just how much of a force it is.

With more than 57 million Facebook DAU, Candy Crush Saga has more DAU than the next four Facebook apps — Farm Heroes Saga, Microsoft Live, Spotify and Pet Rescue Saga — according to AppData.

From now on, the AppData monthly leaderboard on Inside Facebook will reflect DAU values. Click below to see which Facebook apps are the most used.

Name DAU_ESTIMATE 1.  Candy Crush Saga 57,036,085 2.  Farm Heroes Saga 16,755,002 3.  Microsoft Live 14,981,868 4.  Spotify 12,555,049 5.  Pet Rescue Saga 11,546,092 6.  HTC Sense 8,886,518 7.  Hay Day 6,806,699 8.  Bing 5,796,360 9.  Astrology 5,538,426 10.  Yahoo 5,373,265 11.  Criminal Case 4,924,689 12.  Dragon City 4,828,225 13.  Daily Horoscope 4,811,912 14.  Skype 4,792,820 15.  Top Eleven Be a Football Manager 4,689,154 16.  برجك مع مـاغـي فـرح 4,294,815 17.  FarmVille 2 4,172,477 18.  Clash of Clans 4,104,561 19.  Horóscopo Diário 3,987,152 20.  Words With Friends 3,960,849 21.  Pinterest 3,646,322 22.  Flipboard 3,624,771 23.  Papa Pear Saga 3,475,175 24.  Texas HoldEm Poker 3,461,732 25.  Tinder 3,434,942

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Singer has been growing in Facebook influence, as she has now surpassed rapper Eminem to become the 4th-most popular page on Facebook. Shakira has gained more than 800,000 Facebook fans in the past week, according to PageData.

Want to find out which Facebook ? Check out PageData’s monthly leaderboard below.

# Name Total Likes  Daily Growth Weekly Growth 1    Facebook for Every Phone 397,956,663 +521,757 +3,848,355 2    Facebook 142,044,842 +72,751 +14,347,963 3    Rihanna 85,640,557 +27,305 +158,368 4    Shakira 84,128,250 +115,396 +805,679 5    Eminem 82,857,590 +49,867 +364,105 6    Coca-Cola 79,900,857 +19,300 +171,486 7    YouTube 78,591,934 +13,344 +100,646 8    Cristiano Ronaldo 74,758,009 +70,145 +563,535 9    Michael Jackson 70,794,747 +37,122 +264,733 10    The Simpsons 70,714,663 +28,130 +195,713 11    Texas HoldEm Poker 70,122,224 +6,036 +44,695 12    Harry Potter 68,852,902 +14,785 +112,280 13    Vin Diesel 67,628,529 +96,610 +681,674 14    Katy Perry 64,679,198 +45,001 +313,432 15    Justin Bieber 63,587,033 +22,203 +206,913 16    Lady Gaga 63,381,410 +22,340 +159,005 17    Candy Crush Saga 62,966,605 +77,205 +555,030 18    Will Smith 62,946,209 +29,617 +569,765 19    Linkin Park 60,200,415 +20,134 +144,795 20    Beyoncé 57,198,586 +39,713 +276,087 21    FC Barcelona 56,627,438 +105,022 +833,840 22    Bob Marley 56,542,879 +82,057 +560,644 23    Selena Gomez 56,270,929 +34,131 +244,902 24    Taylor Swift 55,694,823 +64,287 +439,740 25    Family Guy 55,443,491 +7,680 +60,235

Other major changes since February:

• Michael Jackson rose from No. 11 to No. 9, moving The Simpsons to No. 10 and Texas Hold’Em Poker to No. 11.
• Will Smith and Linkin Park switched spots on the leaderboard.
• FC Barcelona charged up from No. 25 to No. 21, switching with Family Guy.
• Bob Marley and Selena Gomez traded spots.

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