Well, this unsolicited letter from Omniture (now part of Adobe)  had me scratching my head, since our company specializes in driving Facebook traffic.  Do a Google search on facebook advertising and see where we rank. Also, we have 4,920 fans on Facebook vs Omniture’s 3,410.

What is presumptuous about saying where our traffic comes from is that it’s not possible for Omniture to measure our ad traffic or traffic from various Facebook pages that we have a voice. The old world of web analytics assumed you owned the audience– they hung out on your website. But in modern times, that audience may choose to interact on Facebook with your brand or between friends and perhaps not even set foot on your website. They could be on their phones, in a coffee shop talking, watching TV together, or doing other word-of-mouth things that a pixel cannot capture.

Thus, even if Omniture could magically peek into our Google Analytics (and to which they’d see that 3-10% of our traffic is from Facebook), it would still be missing the picture.  In the world of PPC, there are keyword research tools where you can estimate how much someone is spending on PPC and break it down by keyword.  In Facebook, that’s just not possible because of the targeting options.  I could run ads targeting boys 13-17 that like to play football in the US– and unless you fit that criteria exactly, you just won’t ever see my ads. So to pretend to know how much traffic we get on Facebook is somewhat silly, don’t you think?

Are you also mistakenly assuming that it’s a good thing to rip users away from facebook and into your website?

Because of Facebook’s graph API, it’s now possible to measure your traffic in a user’s news feed (home page), where they spend about 50% of their time. That’s right, most of those likes and comments that may appear as if they are occurring on your Facebook page is actually happening in the news feed.  And though you can pixel a custom tab on your page, you cannot tag your wall, nor can you tag the news feed, which is an order of magnitude larger in traffic than what you can track via only the old way of doing things.

How much of your conversation are you missing by not listening in the right places?

P.S– Sorry, Omniture.  No hard feelings. I get a ton of unsolicited sales letters such as this one, so I randomly picked one to showcase.  If you’d like to write a counter response on how to properly measure the value of a fan, even if they don’t always come to the website (which is what your white paper insists that clients do), I’ll happily post it.

Is this just me or are you also seeing 3 ads on the Facebook homepage? This reminds me of the days when Yahoo! and Google would insert more ads on pages to increase revenue.  Could imagine what Facebook would look like if they inserted ads all over– leaderboards on the top and bottom, and regular ads on the side?  Then they’d collect a 30% fee on payments, plus sell you virtual gifts. Could be a money-making machine, especially if they help advertisers properly capitalize on social targeting options, enhanced by all the new data being made available via the Open Graph and the global like.

Are you scared, excited, disgusted, or indifferent? Seems silly to be spending so many dollars sending traffic to Facebook’s own page– yet there’s no denying the traffic and ROI that stems from doing that, versus sending to your own page.  But if someday your Facebook business page or applications are taken over with ads, then your investment may be less attractive– whether you’re Zynga or not.

This morning, Shoemoney put up a guest post by me covering Facebook Quality Score. Because we manage a few dozen fan pages, as large as a quarter million fans, I wanted to lend insight into what the metric is and what it may mean to advertisers and affiliates in the future.  Let me clarify a few points:

• As far as we know, Facebook isn’t using the Quality Score to ding or help you in any way– but they may later.
• They’ve stated the score is based on percentage of fans who have interacted in the last 7 days. I’m guessing that the Post Quality score is like a batting average: the number of fans who have interacted in the last 7 days versus the total.  Therefore, the theoretical max should be 1,000.  Using this calculation across most of our pages gets us close, but not exactly to the number Facebook lists.
• Keith Wilcox’s score is now 250, which is the highest I’ve seen yet– it will be easier to get a high quality score on a smaller fan base. Getting 25% of 30 fans to participate over 7 days is easier than 25% of 3,000 fans.  Someone should experiment here.  Because of his Facebook page– his top source of traffic– he is now ranking on Google for “getting fit setting goals“.

If you have any questions about Facebook promotion, whether their self-serve PPC platform, creation of pages/groups, building/monetizing applications, just put your question in the comments and I may write a post about it.

Golf-ball sized hail is coming down right now in Boulder- our yard looks like a driving range littered with hail chunks. As an internet marketer, instead of hearing hail pelting our windows, I hear clicks from people typing in “Denver hail damage”, as they need new roofs and car repairs.

Shall we say there is a silver lining to this cloud? BlitzLocal finds ways to profit from bad things happening– whether it be funeral advice,  Denver veterinary care, or even cosmetic surgery.  In fact, most of our client base is medical and legal clients– companies that customers see when there is a problem. Find out where there is pain and you’ll make profit.

Last month, our roofing client had the best month ever– and if the weather keeps up– this month will be the same. We even set up a roofing contractor site– and got 3 new roofing clients in the last two weeks.  It already ranks on “roofing contractor marketing”, which only gets one hit a day. We get 3 visits a day from “roofing marketing” and a whole lot more from Facebook self-serve advertising, which is only 20 cents a click for geo and age targeted traffic (and it’s the best kept secret for small business advertising).

So while other people are freaking out when bad stuff happens, what are you doing to take advantage of the opportunity?

I first heard of Yodle about 4 years ago, back when it was called NatPal, by Nathaniel Stevens out of UPenn, a friend of Brad Twohig, who is our joint friend.  Since then, I’ve seen the company grow from a few dozen clients to a reported 5,000, bring in a CEO (Court Cunningham), and a whole executive team.  Of anyone in the marketplace, I see these guys as the leaders so far, even though Webvisible and ReachLocal are far larger in terms of customer base, revenue, and staff.

The local advertising game is far from won—- the mainstream has yet to see a dominant player emerge, much less be able to recall any name brands.  As much as we’d like to believe the yellow pages will die an instant death, change occurs slowly.  And I see the most efficient player being able to win.  Yodle.com sells less on force of sales and more on the performance basis of calls driven.  Call tracking is powerful, as clients can see measurable impact.  But the game is early.  Nobody yet has figured out a true multi-channel marketing play that delivers pure ROI for local, even though the search engines, yellow pages, newspapers, radio stations, agencies, and other guys are trying to build their own and partner with others.  Expect to see some consolidation as a result of the economic downturn.

The eventual winners (and I believe there is room for many large players) will be the ones that deliver great value to the clients (transparent results and a large share of the client dollar actually going to marketing spend), plus take great care of their sales, operations, and engineering teams.  Social media is increasingly important, for example, Facebook advertising for local. Trouble now is that building such a team realistically costs $5-10MM, depending on how it’s done.  It takes, by my estimate, a team of two dozen folks for two years to build this out.  The fully loaded cost of a person is about $125k in a major metro.  Add in some marketing and sales expense and you can see how the numbers shake out.

Kudos to Yodle.com for being able to raise another round in a difficult environment.