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.

[...] Sabrina tells us why we should run a Facebook ad campaign. [...]

[...] Sabrina has a cool post on a Facebook Ad Campaigns. [...]

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.

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

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.

That, at least, is an incentive to try facebook ads