PPC crowdsourcing firm Trada has released a Facebook version of its advertising marketplace. Trada, founded in September of 2008 in Boulder , Colorado, originated the PPC crowdsourcing concept for Google Adwords. The company will use a similar model to help advertisers target and optimize campaigns on the world’s largest social network.
Trada’s thousands of ad optimizers seek to create the best adword phrases and ad copy that will deliver the most efficient campaign for their clients. The Facebook strategy centers on helping advertisers avoid ad fatigue, a phenomenon that occurs when a user is exposed to the same advertisement over and over. Trada’s strategy constantly renews a campaign with fresh ads as they are created on the fly by the crowdsourced optimizers.
Trada clients set a budget limit for an ad campaign. They also designate where they want to appear- Google is the most common but they can also choose Bing, Yahoo and now Facebook. They enter into the system the amount they are willing to pay for PPC or on a CPA basis.
One of the major challenges of PPC is coming up with the right keyword phrases for a product or service. Trada meets this challenge by crowdsourcing the task to an army of individual freelance experts. They not only build the campaign, they write the ad copy to drive as much traffic to client offers as possible. Each expert gets a cut of the action if he or she is able to run a campaign below the client’s goal efficiencies.
Facebook adds a social integration to the mix. Ad optimizer’s work with clients to generate not only clicks and conversions, but also the ubiquitous Facebook “likes” as well. Trada mostly appeals to mid-sized businesses that cannot afford to pay a dedicated PPC person. If they work with large agencies, they often get lost in the mix.
According to Techcrunch.com, Trada has added more than 500 advertisers and 2000 paid search experts to its marketplace since March of 2010. Trada shares that their typical clients spend anywhere from $3,000 per month all the way up to $500,000 per month on the service.
Recently the Wall Street Journal reported that many of the largest advertisers in the U.S. admit their ad spending on Facebook is not near the size of other sites like Google. According to the Journal, “Facebook will take in less than one fifth the ad revenues per U.S. user that Google, Inc. will this year, eMarketer predicts.” Trada’s crowdsourcing model will help Facebook fill in the gap with thousands of new mid-sized advertisers. If Trada’s success on Google is any indication, their Facebook service will be another success story.
