Our Latest Funding, and My New Role
Today, we’re excited to announce that we have raised $1 Million in additional funding, and I am taking on a new role as the company’s CEO. The new round is a Seed Extension, and includes new investor SoftTech VC, as well as participation from First Round Capital, 500 Startups, Accelerator Ventures, and Joi Ito. We plan to use the funding to develop technology behind our Dynamic Product Ads Platform.
The reason we chose to do a Seed Extension round instead of a larger Series A was because we wanted to prioritize more product development before we scale out our sales and operations. We believe that technology must be at the core of what we do if we are going to solve important problems – and our seed investors understand that technology is not built overnight. It takes at least two nights… maybe three. Regardless, this latest capital infusion will give us the time we need to build a strong technology underpinning to our product that will help us scale more efficiently.
I am thrilled to be entrusted by our Founder Selcuk Atli, and our Board with the role of CEO. Selcuk did an incredible job getting the company to this stage, having raised two rounds of funding and built an all-star team. He will keep driving SocialWire’s vision and pushing our product strategy in new directions as Executive Chairman. We’re all excited for what’s to come.
Introducing Dynamic Product Ads
SocialWire is a recommendation engine for ads. Our mission is to make ads as personalized and useful as product recommendations that you see on Amazon or other retailers. One common example that people are familiar with is the ubiquitous “people who bought this, also bought…” This feature is a great example of using programmatic signals to match the right products to the right audiences. While retailers have been using these signals to power personalization on their websites for years, the next evolution will be to power personalized product ads based on programmatic signals.
Our Beta Clients
We recently launched DPAs in beta with a few clients, including Living Social, Shoedazzle and a few other major retail brands. We’re thrilled to have these great brands as clients, and while we’ve been focused on just them during our beta test, we look forward to inviting more clients into our program. Two consistent themes across these clients that have made them successful are personalization and curation. We are helping them translate those themes into their marketing campaigns.
Curation and Personalization – Key Success Drivers
We have all seen an ecommerce boom in the last few years for the retailers that have embraced the modern success drivers of online sales – personalization and curation. But advertising is doing what it always does – lagging behind. Dynamic Product Ads enable retailers to offer the same level of curation and personalization they do on their websites, in their ads across the web. As a retailer, your customers spend only a fraction of their time on your site compared to the time they spend on Facebook and other sites. Rather than wait for them to come to you, why not bring your personalization and curation to them?
Indeed, Daily Deal and Flash Sales sites have seen success bringing their curation to your inbox. But we’re growing accustomed to skipping over those emails, or letting our smarter email clients filter them out for us. The technology now exists for us to create a rotation of relevant product ads to show me as I navigate across the web – not just in my inbox. Even if I’m not a customer yet, you can still curate a rotation of product ads for me based on other signals like my Facebook interests.
Dynamic Ad Creation
Retargeters are familiar with dynamic ad creation – when someone visits a product on your site, and then you dynamically create an ad from that page and retarget that user on other sites. SocialWire is taking that same dynamic ad creation technique and applying it to prospecting as well. For example, SocialWire can dynamically build ads for every new product on sale, and feature each product in the ad. Our tool enables a marketer to combine static copy with dynamic parameters like so:
{NAME OF SITE}
Check out this {PRODUCT TITLE} from {BRAND} for {PRICE}.
{IMAGE/LINK}
So the ad itself would then look like this, for thousands (or millions) of products….
Dynamic Keyword and Location Targeting
Most Facebook campaigns use only a handful of ads, so the targeting can be done manually, but when you have thousands of unique ads the targeting must be done in bulk or dynamically. We extract product information from the page such as brand, and other relevant keywords, that we dynamically convert into Facebook interest targeting. We have some clients that are doing localized daily deals, so we scrape the location from the page, and dynamically convert that to target the appropriate zip codes on Facebook. Thus, a daily deal for Golf Lessons in San Francisco would automatically be targeted to Facebook users in SF who are interested in Golf, Tiger Woods, The Masters, and other relevant interests that our algorithm finds.
Custom Audiences
In addition to using data from a retailers product pages, we can also use a retailer’s customer data to dynamically target product ads. We use Facebook’s Custom Audiences platform to match all the data that a retailer has on their users to match those specific products to the right customers. This data could include products purchased, products abandoned in the cart, etc. For sites that do highly personalized experiences like Shoedazzle, they can now target every one of their customers with a unique set of product ads tailored specifically for that user. It is like a recommendation engine for ads.
Dynamic Conversion Optimization
Not every product or deal is going to work as an ad – so it is important to be able to optimize for the ones that are getting traction. We do this through dynamic conversion optimization. By enabling marketers to promote every product, we need to enable them to also tell us how much they’re willing to pay to advertise that product before someone buys it. For example, for a $100 product, a retailer might be willing to spend $30 to promote it; while for a $50 product, the retailer would only want to spend $15. We let the marketer simply input their margin (e.g. 30%), and then we dynamically apply that margin to the price that we pull for every product we promote. For the products that are not selling profitably, we pause the associated ads, and reallocate that budget toward the profitable ads.
Requirements:
Getting started with Dynamic Products Ads is very simple and requires no integration. Our standard product crawler will pick up any Facebook open graph tags by default, and for larger clients we will customize our crawler to pick up objects and attributes in whatever format they are currently tagged. We have a waiting list at the moment, and are taking on new clients as soon as we can. You can join the waiting list here.
We’re a PMD!
We’re thrilled to announce that last week, Facebook accepted SocialWire into the Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program with the Apps badge.
We at SocialWire remain a one-two punch for Facebook Ads, but increasingly find ourselves focused on the second punch – the advertising. We’re excited by the challenge of helping Facebook Ads become a more relevant and native experience. Facebook is enabling some truly groundbreaking ways of reaching new and existing audiences, and we’re eager to bring our dynamic display platform to the table as an option for marketers.
SocialWire’s philosophy is to enable more automated and scalable ways for marketers to promote their products. For example, (more…)
A Case for SKU-level Ads
Imagine Facebook as a shopping mall. You hang out with your friends there all day, and retailers are trying to get you to come to their store and shop. In the shopping mall, retailers use display windows. On Facebook, they use display ads. The strategy is the same – pick the most provocative products, display them, and try to get the customer to walk in the door or click through to the site and look at all the other products. But there’s one key difference.
In a shopping mall, retailers can display three to five products at a time, but on Facebook retailers can display every product in their catalog. But retailers are still using the same approach online as they are in shopping malls – they promote three to five products. On Facebook, it’s now possible to programmatically create thousands of ads – one for each product – and target each product to exactly the right customer. This is SKU-level advertising.
Google Product Listing Ads:
Google recently launched a SKU-level ad product called Product Listing Ads (PLA’s). (more…)
Making the World a Better Place, One Facebook Ad at a Time
Our Mission: Make Advertising a Better User Experience
Our mission in launching SocialWire is to make advertising on the web and mobile a better user experience. When I left Digg a couple years ago, one of the biggest regrets was leaving behind DiggAds – the highly successful native ad product that I’d been responsible for creating and bringing to market. DiggAds went on to become the legacy for other social native ad products like Promoted Tweets and Facebook Sponsored Stories. Seeing the success of DiggAds made me a believer that advertising is not a zero sum game – if users like the ad experience, marketers will do better.
The Problem: Marketers Can’t Promote Individual Products
The problem we are setting out to solve is that display advertising is still a relic of magazine ads – the process of placing ads is labor intensive and still a lot of guesswork. What this means for marketers is that they have to make compromises, they can’t advertise their entire product catalog, they need to artificially choose a handful of products to market, and they need to guess at what their target audience is going to be. For example, eBay gets over a million new products added to its catalog every day, it would take an army of people to create ads for each product and figure out whom to target. But what if marketers could advertise every single product to exactly the right people – market the long tail of their products to the long tail of their customers?
A New Kind of Advertising Company
Hello world.
We’ve been burning the midnight oil for months, and today we’re excited to launch a new kind of advertising company. But first, let me tell you why SocialWire doesn’t really do ads.
Advertising sucks for users. Recommendations help us discover things – while ads are often irrelevant and they interrupt our experience. We find product recommendations on Amazon useful and enjoy recommendations from friends on Facebook. When you think about it – isn’t advertising meant to help us discover products much like recommendations?
Advertising sucks for marketers too. Most display advertising is an evolution of print media. Online marketers have to come up with ad creatives, target audiences and test them out to advertise their products. It just takes too much work to promote every single product this way. This becomes even more challenging for online retailers like Gilt Groupe, where sales are often only available for 24 hours. Unlike ads – recommendations require very little maintenance to run and manage.
We’re building a new kind of advertising company – committed to empowering marketers of all sizes from sellers on Etsy to the largest online retailers. The solution starts with a personalized experience for users and a technology that relies on data instead of guesswork and testing. Ads are recommendations – recommendations are ads.
SocialWire is turning this vision into a platform that makes advertising useful for people while seamless to run and manage for marketers. Today we start with SocialWire CONNECT and AMP – two products that help marketers run a different kind of ad on Facebook: recommendations from friends.
This is just the beginning… Stay tuned!
Selcuk Atli
Founder and CEO