As Facebook Eyes Online Deals Space, Groupon Plots Facebook Ad Blitz

Wednesday, March 16th, 2011

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Facebook is looking to shake up the social ecommerce industry with yesterday’s expansion of Deals, its location-aware rewards program. The company is expected to turn Deals into a serious rival to online coupon, collective purchasing and location-based daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial.

We’ve learned that Groupon, in turn, has tapped a startup called AdParlor to exclusively manage their advertising spend on Facebook. The group buying site will let AdParlor run “tens of thousands of ad variations” on the wildly popular social networking service.

In a way, Groupon will thus be increasing Facebook’s revenue, which will enable the social network juggernaut to more effectively compete against Groupon. This, of course, is a very simplistic way to look at these things – the truth is that for Groupon, like many companies, Facebook could prove to be a phenomenal platform for massive user acquisition.

In essence, AdParlor will run all of Groupon ads on the right-hand column of Facebook through a wide variety of campaigns – from generic ads driving users to sign-up for daily emails to deal-specific advertising units with a focus on driving direct sales.

Through dynamic ad creation and bid optimization, AdParlor, which has official access to the Facebook Ads API, says it manages to purchase advertising on the social networking site more effectively than any other party.

AdParlor says it already works with the some of the largest advertisers on Facebook, including companies like Ubisoft and Playfirst, and currently manages over 15 billion monthly impressions.

Kristaps Ronka, chief technology officer at AdParlor, explains how the startup will try and help Groupon grow its business by advertising on Facebook:

“We have built a powerful layer of artificial intelligence connecting the Groupon API and the Facebook Ads API. This allows us to dynamically build effective creatives for every Groupon deal and then micro-target them to the users who would be most interested in them.”

Indeed, the integration with Groupon’s API allows AdParlor to instantly create and micro-target effective ads to Facebook users the minute a deal goes live.

Let’s hope – for Groupon’s sake in particular – that the startup does a better job at not randomly throwing around Botox ads left and right.

Company: AdParlor
Website: adparlor.com
Launch Date: 2008

AdParlor is the leader in managing large Facebook campaigns. We offer a full-service solution and manage advertising on Facebook Ads (right-hand-column) for the majority of the large spenders on the platform. While we bring on all types of advertisers, we specialize in growing Facebook applications - having delivered well over 20 Million installs on a CPI (cost per install) model!

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Company: Groupon
Website: groupon.com
Launch Date: November 11, 2008
IPO: July 11, 2011, Nasdaq:GRPN

Groupon features a daily deal on the best stuff to do, see, eat, and buy in more than 565 cities around the world. By promising businesses a minimum number of customers, Groupon can offer deals that aren’t available elsewhere. Groupon brings buyers and sellers together in a fun and collaborative way that offers the consumer an unbeatable deal, and businesses a large number of new customers. To date, it has saved consumers more than $300 million and claims it...

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Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: February 1, 2004
Funding: $2.34B

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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