…but you may still want to try it.
At this point is there anyone in America who isn’t on Facebook? The site boasts over 200 million active users, and more than 100 million log on to Facebook at least once a day. This is obviously a very engaged audience, just what you’re looking for as a marketer.
While I was at SMX in Seattle a few weeks ago, I sat down with some of the Facebook folks who were there (a bunch of very nice, very evangelical Facebook fans) and they took me on a great tour of the Facebook interface.
It’s really easy to quickly create ads in Facebook, and very user friendly, especially for small businesses as you don’t need a lot of money to get started. You can target different audiences, different locations, set a budget, and monitor progress using the reports. You can purchase ads using a CPM or CPC model, which makes it very easy to test the same messaging as you would use in your pay-per-click campaigns.
So does it work? During last year’s Pay Per Click Summit in Los Angeles (Sept 2008), I surveyed a bunch of attendees and asked whether they had tried Facebook as an advertising vehicle. Only about 10% had, and out of that 10% maybe 3 or 4 had experienced good results. But now it’s 2009 and Facebook has re-vamped their advertising platform, and also put the ads in the upper right hand “call-to-action” portion of their pages so after SMX I asked my Twitter and Facebook followers, and discovered advertisers give it very mixed reviews.
This time maybe 20% of folks surveyed had tried Facebook Advertising and approximatley 50% were getting good results, but that’s hardly competitive with the kind of response you would get from advertisers using AdWords, where conversion rates of 20% and more are possible.
So who are the folks getting the results? Basically the same folks who get good results using Contextual Advertising. So it’s really not fair to compare Facebook to Google. In fact, they are just another large publisher (like the Wall Street Journal or ESPN.com) and you need to create, target and determine the CPA for your ads accordingly.
Contextual Ads can work extremely well for products that are impulse buys, or for branding, and the more targeted they are to the content on the page the better. Advertisers selling mortgages, insurance, entertainment, weight loss products, etc. are all doing very well with Facebook advertising, as are affiliate marketers generating leads for these types of businesses and for other products.
So can it work for your business? Just like any form of advertising you need to test it. If you are currently doing contextual advertising with something like Google Adsense or ContextWeb then it’s easy. Just set up similar campaigns targeting the same placement and demographics on Facebook and test against each other to see what works.
If you are not currently using content ads then it is very easy to set up a campaign in Facebook. Here are some tips to get you started:
1) Most rules of pay-per-click also apply to Facebook marketing. Make sure your offer matches the landing page, and the keywords/images in your ad are consistent with the landing page also.
2) Include a call to action in your ad. Just like writing an AdWords ad, but punchier.
3) Less is more when it comes to text/copy and graphics. In fact writing like the “National Enquirer” might be totally appropriate as you only have a few minutes to catch people’s attention. Big headlines can work. This is not AdWords where folks are already looking for what you are selling. With Facebook you’re trying to get people’s interest when they are focused on something else entirely, so make your headlines snappy.
4) Consider testing a contest. I’ve heard of advertisers getting good results with them, and they may appeal more to social media users who aren’t really in buying mode.
5) Geo-target your campaigns well. If you don’t ship to Canada or the UK – don’t advertise there.
6) Try segmenting your campaigns by gender to make them more targeted
7) Use people in your graphic ads if possible. Just like on landing pages people respond to pictures of other people.
Just remember, as with Contextual Advertising, you shouldn’t try this form of advertising (or actually, any advertising at all) if you don’t have good tracking on your site. Content ads can take more tweaking to get them to perform, and you may need to test and track many variations before you find that sweet spot.
Have you tried Facebook Advertising? If you have, we’d love to hear your results. Tweet me at @ppcsummit or post a comment at www.ppcsummit.com/newsletter in response to this article. We’re also considering adding a session on Social Media Advertising at our upcoming PPC Summit in Los Angeles in September. Please let me know if you are interested in that also, and we’ll add it to the agenda.
To Your Continued Success Online,
Mary O’Brien
Chairman and Founder PPC Summit
While the rule isn’t set in stone, the fact is that anything you videotape will fall into one, or a combination of these categories. Contextual
Is there any stats about the age of the visitors of Facebook. I have a retirement website I want to promote and I don’t think it will be good idea to advertise there.
Hey Shabla,
Per a recent article in SES magazine by Erik Qualman, the fastest growing audience on Facebook is women age 55 – 65.
I’ve also heard from many advertisers who are doing better on Facebook with products for older audiences rather than younger ones.
You really need to test it though.
Cheers, Mary
We’ve had excellent results so far with facebook advertising. In a recent campaign, we were able to generate 3X the conversion rates on Facebook, than we were on Google Adwords. You can read that case study at: http://www.internexperts.com/facebook-advertising-overview.html.
The key for us has been to research and test facebook’s related “interest categories”.Also, specific demographic targeting is critical. In our campaigns CTRs for women were 2X that of men, and the response rate in the 35+ age category was 80% higher.
Shabla, I think you might have good results advertising your retirement site on Facebook. Our highest converting segment for our campaigns was the 45 – 54 age group. So, you might be surprised by your results.
Thanks for the comments Mark. That’s a great case study. Appreciate you sharing it to help Shabla. I’ve re-tweeted it using @internexperts.
The problem with Facebook is that it is so broken. I nearly gave up trying to post my first advert. Also as a normal user I can “like” and advert or kill it with the X button. When I do this it asks me why. However these statistics are not passed back to the advertiser. What a lost opportunity!