Physics Doesn't Exist; It's all Gnomes

"Physics Doesn't Exist; It's all Gnomes" is an actual group on Facebook...with a whopping 42,996 members. And if you want a good chuckle, skim through the names of thousands of other Facebook groups.

Beyond a chuckle, what are these groups good for? Target marketing. You would skip over the Gnome nerds...unless...you were the guy selling the "I heart geeks" T-shirts.

Web usability guru Jakob Neilsen recently put out a report that web banner ads are not seen on the web. That said, I started to wonder about how targeted social media banner ads would perform.

How targeted can your ads be on Facebook? Very. This morning I created a Facebook ad for a local website http://www.dsmgolflessons.com/. After going through the process, Facebook reported the ad would potentially reach 3,280 people who have identified likes of "golf" or "golfing" and who live in Ankeny, Altoona, Des Moines, West Des Moines, Ames and Urbandale.

I also placed an ad for a major motion picture's site http://www.finalseason.com/. After going through the process again, Facebook said this ad could reach 775,280 people in the United States who listed some sort of baseball love in their profile.

For the next few weeks, I will keep a close eye on the number of hits the ads receive and the respective Google Analytics reports for the web traffic (also a critical part of our usual web design and development process for our clients).

I will keep ya posted on what I find out about the ads' effectiveness...

~Stephanie