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.”