This article from Ad Age does a great job simplifying the process of banner ad optimization. It also reminds us to never be satisfied with the performance of a display ad campaign. Creative plays a major role and it can always be better.

Making Online Ads Suck Less in 8 Easy Steps – Advertising Age – DigitalNext.

Before today, I have been impressed with the efficiency and demographic targeting of Facebook’s advertising platform. The only frustration I was experiencing was not being able to track conversions within Facebook to have an instant view of my cost per acquisition.

Today, I found an email from Facebook in my inbox announcing that they added conversion tracking! This means we’ll be able to measure any actions visitors take on our site after clicking a Facebook ad.

Watch out Google! Not only is Facebook cheaper on a cpc basis… I have a feeling the traffic converts better as well.

Here is the announcement from Facebook:

Conversion tracking allows you to track the activity that happens on your website as a result of someone seeing or clicking on your Facebook Ad. In combination with ad statistics like impressions and clicks, conversion tracking will help you better understand the value of your Facebook Ad campaign, and more efficiently manage your ads. With conversion tracking, you have the ability to track registrations, sales, or anything else that makes sense to your business. Give it a try.

This article on AdAge.com reminds us that when evaluating the performance of online display ads, the art, copy, size and position on the page aren’t all that matter. The article points out the importance of environment. In other words, what is the visitor doing on the page when they see your ad. For example, if you run the same ad in an email inbox that you run in a side bar on a blog, you shouldn’t expect the same results. People in their inbox reading/writing email are a lot less likely to allow distractions than people reading a blog.

If you are running a Google Content Network campaign, you should take a closer look at how you are testing creative. Try some managed placements to help eliminate the environment variable.

Check out the article: Location Matters: How Ad Environments Affect Performance – Advertising Age – DigitalNext.