In summer 2009, I discovered Facebook ads. Yes, I was a little late adopting them, but once I found them, I loved them. I thought they were the greatest thing since sliced bread, a marketers dream. I used them very successfully with clients and for myself.
However, about March of 2010, I started noticing a huge down turn in clicks and quality of visitors from that source. This was an observation across a few different industries. Bounce rates were at 89% or higher from the Facebook traffic and none converted to leads of any kind. I have almost completely abandoned them. I am going to do one more test within an industry I haven’t tried before, but that may be the end for me based on how that goes.
I know there are several marketers and small business owners/managers who read this blog, and I am hoping you will take this quick poll or leave comments below on your experience with Facebook ads.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I have been advertising on facebook for about 3 years and been doing pretty well.. The key is the image, headline, demographic and splitting each campaign.
Kevin-
You bring up very good points. I have found that the image choice can make a huge difference. I just completed a test campaign with a FB ad last week and it went very well. I’ll be writing a blog post about it later this week.
Thanks again for your comments!
Jennifer
There is an authorized 3rd party tool on Facebook that can help advertisers know the real ROI of their ads, taking any back-office / CRM metric (e.g., real sales) into account. This is a leapfrog over standard conversion tracking. Check out Facebook’s official Ads API Vendors page on: http://developers.facebook.com/adsapivendors/#Edge
Hey Jennifer. I think it depends on the goals. In my case, the client who recently wanted FB ads had a goal of purely bumping up their FB numbers. That is, they wanted more people on the page who would be able to engage, talk about issues concerning the topic of their store (they are an eco-friendly boutique). The page has some great discussions going, and then often posts specific store information (sales, new products, etc). By having more people on the page, there is the opportunity that more people will engage, and then learn about the store, and that will result in sales. From that standpoint, it’s been a success.
You make good points Shane. I have only done one campaign with the goal of boosting FB page numbers, and that one worked very well. All of the others have been driving traffic to an outside page, and there were mixed results there. Had a very successful campaign recently and will be blogging about that this week.
Thanks again for your insightful comments.
Jennifer
I had only used Google Ads, PPC in the past, and have only just stumbled across Facebook ads. So far my results have been ok, but I may have to tweek some of my settings for better results. I also think Facebook advertising could be better than Google?? Michael Harrington
I have been using Facebook Ads for a very long time and it can be tricky with getting the impressions and the clicks that you would want for your specific campaigns that you would want to have. But, one thing I have been doing is increasing my per click amount higher than the suggested amount that even Facebook is asking for. That way I am able to get the specific impressions that I am looking for with a specific affiliate program I am apart of.
If you are not seeing the results that you would like within 9 days then what you need to be doing is changing up the title,body, and also the interests and demographic that you have set with that specific ad. A lot of people just fail to really optimize the ad it self and feel if you just change one thing your going to get more success where it is the entire Ad itself that would needed to be changed. If you are not getting the CTR that you want make sure that you are running multiple campaigns at one time instead of just running one ad and hoping for success. That is where you can track what is working and what is not and where you should be increasing or decreasing your pay per day amount you had set out.
Thanks for the feedback on the article. You give some good information.
This is interesting to me – I’m taking away from this that some of you have used ads mostly to just drive traffic to your fb page? Brilliant, if so. Probably more worthwhile than ppc/adwords.