One of the things those gurus love to preach is the usefulness of targeting your Facebook ads with keyword sets. If I hear one more promise that “yeah it’s easy, you just like add some keywords, and then you get a crazy high CTR”, I’m going to stab my eyeballs out with the half-eaten chicken dippers on my desk. It’s only easy if you know where to start. And most people don’t. So let’s start with the basics.

I’m going to show you an example of how keyword targeting worked quite nicely for me last year. The clue for why I’m willing to part with this information is hidden at the end of the last sentence. It worked last year. It might work now, it might not. One thing you’ll learn quickly about keyword targeting is that it has a much smaller scope for scaling. Keyword targeting can make you money, but clever demographic targeting can make you rich. Great marketers have mastered both.

So why do we use keyword sets?

If we’re bidding CPM, we’re paying every time our ad is displayed – no matter who views it, and no matter how relevant they are to the offer. Simple logic dictates that we want to reduce the number of stray eyeballs catching our message to only those who are likely to qualify as potential customers. We can do this by using keywords to search for users who’ve added certain information to their profile.

A fine example was Many Body Theory’s post last month, showing how to create a dating ad on Facebook for insane ROI. The gist of the post was that in order to find people who’d potentially be interested in joining a dating site, we could add “zoosk” to our keyword set and target only users who’ve mentioned or liked Zoosk on their profile.

Suddenly, your target market is reduced from a few million to 30,000 users. The CTR will improve with a great leap but the problem is obvious. How do we scale beyond 30,000 users? Even if every single user popped us $4 per lead, that’s still only $120,000 revenue.

This is where you have to get creative with your keyword sets and learn what I like to call persuasion via association.

Here’s an example of persuasion via association:

You’ll noticed I’ve blurred her face out. This is a standard trick I use at the end of the night, after a few too many pints, when I’ve failed to get lucky and instead dragged home a London ghetto rat. Blurring helps, kids. Especially in the morning.

On a serious note, I’ve been working recently to ensure that I only use images if I own the creative license to them. It’s a massively ignored problem in the affiliate world. And although I’m not perfect – some of my creatives still need replacing – you should think twice before sourcing directly from Bing. You’ve got shit in your pants and if the owner of the original image catches a whiff, you’ll probably hear all about it.

Anyway, why is the example above effective? Put simply, it isn’t. Not until you combine it with some highly targeted keywords. Let me show you how it comes together…

See where we’re going? All of the keywords are closely related to Manchester United Football Club. Facebook has made a big song and dance about approving ads that sell “unrelated features” in a product. You could argue that Manchester United has absolutely nothing to do with Cupid, Zoosk or whatever dating site you want to promote. But there’s no mention in the ad copy. The only reference we have comes from the girl in our image. She’s wearing a United jersey with that familiar MySpace camera angle that works so well on dating ads.

I’ve experimented a lot with this on Facebook, and it still proves to be successful even after the latest blitzing round of guidelines changes.

The eyes of single, male, Manchester United fans are much more likely to light up when they see an attractive girl flaunting the jersey of their favourite team. It’s a double attention grabber. And if you’re subtle about it, you should be able to get the ad approved before making some vast and sweeping changes to your destination landing page. And that’s where the money is made with this kind of technique.

When I talk about using persuasion via association, there’s a thin line to be obeyed. Capturing the attention of the user with a little association is one thing. Obliterating your quality score by sending a bunch of leads that think they’re going to a dating website with thousands of sexy female Manchester United fans…that’s a different business altogether.

The key is to design a landing page that references your original message – you might find other female United fans when you join us – and build a greater more powerful urge in the reader’s mind. A more powerful urge could be well I’ve been looking around for a girl that shares my interests and I can’t find one, maybe I should give this site a shot?

It’s a lot easier to execute your sales pitch once you’ve grabbed the user’s attention. And you would be amazed how something as simple as an attractive girl wearing the jersey of a guy’s favourite football team can be enough to flick a switch in his mind. Suddenly the service being advertised is cool and compatible. It feels like something where his kind belong. Unfortunately the entire concept will fall apart if you don’t get the landing page pieced together correctly. I’m not going to share my tips for sealing the deal so to speak, so you’ll just have to get testing for yourself.

While this is a very small and niche example, I hope you can appreciate how marketing with keyword sets doesn’t have to be so linear. You don’t have to stick to a favourite football team that your campaign is based around. It could be a favourite band, a certain hobby…the possibilities are pretty endless. As long as this retarded craze for people to “like” shit on Facebook continues, there are always going to be opportunities for marketers to herd individuals in to groups.

If you can find a mutual interest in a large demographic, you can write the kind of laser targeted ad copies that will demand and receive your reader’s attention.

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