Sabrina Dent: Freelance web designer, developer and internet marketer living in Cork, Ireland with one dog and a husband in no particular order.
Why You Should Run a Facebook Ad Campaign
Online advertising in Ireland is, frankly, an expensive pain in the arse. There are very few venues where advertisers can directly place ads, and when you’re trying to match the venue to your client’s product so the ad is well-niched, the pool shrinks considerably.
On top of that, advertising driven websites here are selling ad space in their ridiculously laden sidebars at a CPM rate of €10 and up – that’s €10 or more for every 1,000 times your ad is shown. Some of these sites have a click-through rate of .06%, which means that for every person who finally clicks your ad, you’ve paid a whopping €16.66. My response to that is “fuck right off. ”
For this reason, I like Facebook. Facebook is universally reviled for having the worst click-thru rate in the industry at an average of .04%, but here’s the thing: I don’t care. I’m not being charged per impression; I’m being charged per click. I don’t care that an ad was viewed 50,000 times before it got a single click – I care that I got a total of 606 clicks at an average cost of 24 cents each.
Compare 24 cents to €16.66, and you’ll start liking Facebook, too.
For its sins, Facebook allows a very nice level of targeting – country, age, gender, relationship status, orientation, and as a bonus, you can further refine by keywords in people’s interests profiles. That’s a real strength.
It also has a lot of drawbacks, so it can work well for some kinds of campaigns and not so well for others:
- It’s bouncy. The bounce rate off Facebook click thrus is very high. For a client with a bounce rate normally in the 30s, we saw bounce rates in the mid-60s from Facebook.
- It doesn’t convert. Trying to sell product off Facebook ads has resulted in a uniformly abysmal goal conversion rate and the ROI is crap. Non-financial goals do better.
- The billing is shit. Seriously shit. There’s no company name on the irritating daily email receipts, and no sniff of a VAT receipt either.
Having said all of that, I still like Facebook for some purposes. It’s great for:
- Pure traffic. If all you need to do is raise your visitor numbers, Facebook will deliver. They serve a massive number of pages, so even at a 0.04% click thru rate, you’ll see as much traffic as you’re willing to pay for.
- Brand Awareness. You only get charged when someone clicks, so as far as I’m concerned, the last batch of ads I ran got my client’s brand in front of people 742,000 times for free.
- Targeted Ads: If you desperately want to target gay people, married women, or men between 25 and 35 with a stated interest in Battlestar Galactica, Facebook can be very precise within the available parameters.
And frankly, even if Facebook was entirely shite, I’m still not paying €16.66 per click. As one client pointed out, “I’d be better off standing on a street corner and offering passers by a tenner to step into my shop.”
27 Jan 2009
| In: Advertising + Design + Ireland + Marketing | Tags:advertising costs, facebook, online advertising
Interesting article, but I want to comment on the illustration – it’s very nice :)
27.01.2009, 11:41 amHi Sabrina,
in terms of conversion rate, how much is down to FB versus how good the site/landing page is on funneling the clickers into the sale?
Interested to hear your thoughts.
Lar
27.01.2009, 11:44 amExcellent post Sabrina. We are looking at developing awareness of our service through Facebook so this is very helpful information.
27.01.2009, 11:47 amGood post – Straight to the point.
27.01.2009, 11:50 amHow about a Google Ads V Facebook Ads Sabrina-Dent-Off? You seem to be in the right place to do this.
Brilliant article Sabrina!
I have only established my company this year and have been using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as marketing tools! So far I have managed to get bookings through all 3 mediums and that’s without paying for any advertising! I have been considering advertising on Facebook and this has certainly helped in my decision making process.
Thank youm
Stephen
27.01.2009, 11:58 amAnd there’s $100 of free facebook ads if you join this visa network: http://apps.facebook.com/visabusiness/sign_up
That, at least, is an incentive to try facebook ads
27.01.2009, 11:58 am@Laurence Veale: Well, if we start with the assumption that in and of themselves, any ad I design for you is a great ad… :)
The most recent FB campaign I did was for curious Wines. We did four ad variations split between “great wine for under a tenner/cases from €99″ themes, one of which included a special FB-only discount code in the tiny amount of ad copy you’re allowed.
At the suggestion of Damien Mulley, I then:
1) Duplicated the company’s home page, but changed the homepage banner to reflect the ad offer themes and plug the discount code; I linked half the ads to this.
2) I linked the other ads to the price-sorted listing page of all wines under €10.
I believe they got one sale out of 600+ clicks. This is vastly lower than their normal conversion rate. They did get some newsletter signups, which is great for the long term and something we didn’t expect – but even if you assign an optimistic value to each of those sign-ups, the ROI is still pants.
@Ant Galvin: I can and will do that at some point, but AdWords is harder to write/talk about because you have to do it without mentioning your super secret keywords, Google’s own variables are much more complex, and so much of it is how good your ad copy is.
Good stuff Sabrina !
Last year I did some FB tests, and had about 10-15 ad variations, and targeted at slightly different markets (targetted viewers). Once I found the 2 ads that was performing well, I stopped the others, and increased the spend, which brought down the CPC.
paul
27.01.2009, 12:21 pmOur Google Ads tests showed that the best value placement in terms of Cost per Registration (classic shopping cart process – Reg is a pre-req for Sale)was on about page 4 of search results.
Not great for pure traffic or brand-building, but the RoI was great. CPC for page 1 (*especially* slot-1, p-1) was just stupid-crazy – reserved for those who fired their central heating with £10 notes.
27.01.2009, 12:41 pmNice post Sabrina. There is great potential for online to destroy other media for advertising as long as it’s priced sensibly.
27.01.2009, 1:30 pm[...] Sabrina has a cool post on a Facebook Ad Campaigns. [...]
27.01.2009, 1:42 pm[...] Sabrina tells us why we should run a Facebook ad campaign. [...]
28.01.2009, 7:18 amSabrina, read your post and signed up with two ads. Since going live yesterday evening at around 5pm Irish time they’ve been in front of more than 24,000 people, with a CTR of 0.8%.
The most interesting thing was the spread in the CTR between the two ads. The ads advertised two separate product offerings. One got four times the clicks of the other, so today I’m off to add several more ads in other areas to see where the appetite is. I’ll up the daily spend for a fortnight to see what takes, then pare back the ads and reduce the daily spend once I see what’s working.
As far as advertising goes, impressions are cheap. But the market research potential is huge – and even cheaper.
And I’ve just realised that a previous comment elucidates all this perfectly. I’m just excited, that’s all. I needed to share.
30.01.2009, 10:28 amI like the street-corner-tenners analogy!
19.03.2009, 5:54 pmV. useful information, Sabrina – I’ve been thinking of running a Facebook campaign for my business and this has been a huge help.
27.03.2009, 12:42 pm