Is Facebook advertising becoming the new norm, does it work and how hard is it? I’ve had these questions knocking around in my head for a while, but this weekend I finally decided to get some answers. It seemed that the best way to test the usability and success of Facebook advertising was to run a campaign for Project Wander and document the results, so that’s exactly what I did.
To make this test as useful as possible, I only used free tools- Alexa.com, Google analytics and Facebook. The target audience for my ad was based on Alexa.com’s “Audience snapshot” of my site:
The actual ad wasn’t overly creative, simply my logo with an invitation to join the discussion:
I matched my ad targeting to what Alexa.com had suggested was my main demographic, except for the relationship status which I set to “Any” and limited the countries to those which google analytics had shown the most traffic comes from:
*This was modified before the ad ran to include women, doubling the estimated reach.
I had initially included the interests “Travel” and “Social Media” which gave me an estimated reach of 120,000 people, but decided that narrowing the target to include only “Tourism” and “Tourism Management” would probably make for better results. This brought the reach down to 6,680 people, meaning that my ad could have been wasted
My initial ad was going to be on a cost per click basis, but I decided to cancel it and opt for the cost per impression model. Being that I’m not actually selling anything, I couldn’t justify the 8 clicks per day at 10 dollars Facebook was willing to give me, .65 cents per 1000 views seemed to be the more logical approach.
Prediction: The ad won’t get too many clicks, I feel that my target audience probably knows too much about advertising to click on paid ads. I could be wrong, but the value will probably be in getting my site seen, rather than clicked through to.
Budget: 10.00 AUD per day
Bid per 1000 impressions: .65 cents
Results: The results of my mini Facebook ad experiment were unexpectedly positive. My budget per day was very small (10.00 AUD), but was ever exceeded. With such a small target group, the cost per impression ended up being a half the price of the cost per click method. I attribute this to the relevancy of the ad to the target market- with less specific keywords/demographics, I would have gone through my budget within an hour.
Number of clicks in 1.5 days: 12
The average cost per click: .81 Cents
Average number of pages visited: 3
Average time spent on site: 3 minutes
Brand impressions: 32,000
My original assumptions proved to be half right. The ad did not generate a huge amount of clicks, but the traffic that did come through was high quality (Viewed multiple pages, spent time on the site etc.,) making it actually quite valuable. The campaign monitoring tools were extremely easy to understand and the statistics offered by Facebook were more than adequate for my needs.
Facebooks ad platform is an extremely scalable advertising solution. Someone with a blog and some extra dollars could use it to boost traffic from a demographic they believe would benefit from their site as I have, or a business looking to grab some traffic could launch a huge brand building campaign extremely easily.
I hope this test has been helpful for anyone thinking about using Facebook advertising but not sure if it’s right for them. As usual, please leave any thoughts and experiences experiences in the comments below.
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I recently used Facebook for an awareness campaign that was HIGHLY targeted. We were trying to drive traffic to our website to get the users to sign up for a private beta test of our hyperlocal communication tool. I was very unsure how it would work but ultimately was VERY please with the results. $50 USD brought us 490,000 impressions and 92 clicks. Out of the 92 clicks driven to gotootie.com, a little under 2/3 signed up for the beta test. Just for fun, I decided to test the same ad on Myspace because I had a credit. The experience was not favorable. 1) I could not finely target my demographic like Facebook. 2) $120 USD brought us 280,000 impressions and 40 clicks. 3) Out of the 40 clicks driven to Gotootie, only 5 signed up for the Beta Test. In the end, Facebook was a more effective campaign that allowed us to focus better and not waste money on people we don't target.
grayum_ian
I think thats the factor that puts facebook advertising ahead of everything else, you are only spending money on people that might actually click on your your ad.
I didn't know people advertised on Myspace :) I have some credits for adwords, but I think people have studied that to death, plus I can guess the outcome won't be as good as facebook.
It's impressive that you actually got people to sign up for something, I would have thought that would be very difficult.
We already had a high-level of awareness in the group that we targeted so, I'm sure that factored into the high sign up rate. I wish I could say it was our great ad design and front page content but that wouldn't be the truth. LOL! BTW: Nice blog and good luck.
Even I had this confusion while planning promotional activities for my company illume creative studio. But I could say facebook adds are worth. Facebook is very sensible as like google, it really reads our profile content and shows more relevant adds while we use FB. For example, recently I updated my profile with the word Joomla and later I was able to see joomla related adds on my profile page every time.... So FB narrows our adds to our target market.
grayum_ian
I agree, the targeting was the best part. I got to show my ad to 6000-12,000 people that actually cared about it instead of a million that could care less. Did you use the facebook ads for Illume creative studio?
Facebook advertising experiment with results
To make this test as useful as possible, I only used free tools- Alexa.com, Google analytics and Facebook. The target audience for my ad was based on Alexa.com’s “Audience snapshot” of my site:
The actual ad wasn’t overly creative, simply my logo with an invitation to join the discussion:
I matched my ad targeting to what Alexa.com had suggested was my main demographic, except for the relationship status which I set to “Any” and limited the countries to those which google analytics had shown the most traffic comes from:
*This was modified before the ad ran to include women, doubling the estimated reach.
I had initially included the interests “Travel” and “Social Media” which gave me an estimated reach of 120,000 people, but decided that narrowing the target to include only “Tourism” and “Tourism Management” would probably make for better results. This brought the reach down to 6,680 people, meaning that my ad could have been wasted
My initial ad was going to be on a cost per click basis, but I decided to cancel it and opt for the cost per impression model. Being that I’m not actually selling anything, I couldn’t justify the 8 clicks per day at 10 dollars Facebook was willing to give me, .65 cents per 1000 views seemed to be the more logical approach.
Prediction: The ad won’t get too many clicks, I feel that my target audience probably knows too much about advertising to click on paid ads. I could be wrong, but the value will probably be in getting my site seen, rather than clicked through to.
Budget: 10.00 AUD per day
Bid per 1000 impressions: .65 cents
Results: The results of my mini Facebook ad experiment were unexpectedly positive. My budget per day was very small (10.00 AUD), but was ever exceeded. With such a small target group, the cost per impression ended up being a half the price of the cost per click method. I attribute this to the relevancy of the ad to the target market- with less specific keywords/demographics, I would have gone through my budget within an hour.
Number of clicks in 1.5 days: 12
The average cost per click: .81 Cents
Average number of pages visited: 3
Average time spent on site: 3 minutes
Brand impressions: 32,000
My original assumptions proved to be half right. The ad did not generate a huge amount of clicks, but the traffic that did come through was high quality (Viewed multiple pages, spent time on the site etc.,) making it actually quite valuable. The campaign monitoring tools were extremely easy to understand and the statistics offered by Facebook were more than adequate for my needs.
Facebooks ad platform is an extremely scalable advertising solution. Someone with a blog and some extra dollars could use it to boost traffic from a demographic they believe would benefit from their site as I have, or a business looking to grab some traffic could launch a huge brand building campaign extremely easily.
I hope this test has been helpful for anyone thinking about using Facebook advertising but not sure if it’s right for them. As usual, please leave any thoughts and experiences experiences in the comments below.
While this ad was running, I happened to find a really good post on Facebook advertising by Philip Canes. I suggest you check it out as well.