facebook ads

[Tabitha]

OK, I just ran facebook ad. It is pretty cool. You get to target your audience, male, female, straight, gay, age range, favorite website, etc. You can even target EX) people who read a specific magazine or listen to a particular radio station.

It's a pay per click and you have to set your click value and your daily spending allowance.

It suggested .88cents per click but I set up for .10cents per click just to see what happens.

I would like to know who else has run ads at facebook, what they paid per click & how effective it was.

Anyone?

 

[southernheartsoaps]

Cool, I was wondering how those worked, had thought about doing it myself, but don't really have much of an ad budget right now. Good luck!

 

[Rob K]

We ran some for a while - had tens of thousands of impressions, a few clicks and no sales. Our conclusion was that people on fb are not shopping...

 

[Tabitha]

I think someone said in a diff thread that the trick was to offer a giveaway if someone friended you they would be entered into a drawing. This built a friend list & they would get your regular posts which built a customer base.

 

[Tabitha]

WEll- I got zezro impressions in 24 hours. That means it was never even shown.

Was .10cents per click too low? I do not think it is worth paying over 10 cents to get a 'view'.

 

[Rob K]

When we ran our fb ads, we chose the "pay per click" option as well. Essentially you are bidding against other advertisers to see whose ad gets displayed. So if you set your rate too low, you will not see any impressions.

After playing around with different rates for a while, we found that you generally have to meet or exceed the suggested rate to get impressions. When we set it at the suggested rate we would get about 10K-15K impressions for a day or two, and then they would fall off to almost nothing. When I checked the suggested rate at that point it was much higher, almost 2x the previous day. We monitored the suggested rate for a while, and found it fluctuates both wildly and rapidly. If you check it often, and "buy" when the rate happens to be low you can get some impressions, but as I said earlier they didn't translate into clicks (or sales). Eventually we just gave up on it as it was taking too much effort for zero results.

After this experience, I did a little more research and found that the general consensus on fb ads was "don't bother, Google AdWords is much more cost effective." This was from a multitude of respondents who had tried both. At this point I haven't had a chance to try AdWords yet, but I may as I just got a $100 coupon from them.

Hope this helps...

 

[Tabitha]

As a small biz, I do not think impressions would do me any good. If I were a chain store, flashing my logo & this weeks ad would be worth it.

I feel clicks would be effective because they could turn into followers. They suggested something like .67cents per click which is crazy even if 1 out of 10 clicks turns into a buyer, that means I paid $7.00 to get a customer.

 

[Manchy]

i think this belongs here, even though it's about adwords, not fb ads

so, i also received a 100$ coupon from google to try adwords (which is great, as i meant to try it anyway, but this way i had a chance to do it for free).

in my experience, it's not worth it (of course, i imagined that i actually payed for the ads). we had many impressions, but a daily limit of 10$ was spent in like 20 minutes! and i don't think that we got any single sale from all those visitors.

some advices from my little experience :
- forbid some sites. big portals got us 90% of the traffic, but i also think that their users are too general public for our site. if i blocked them right away, maybe my money wouldn't be spent so fast, and also maybe i'd get better hits, from specific sources.
also, there were tens of no-name blogs and sites that drove traffic, but click through rate from there was 100%, and of course i was suspicious and blocked them.
- image ads. i immediately made one text ad and two image adds, but by the time image adds were approved the text one was already few days showing around. the price per click was almost the same for image and text ads, which is crazy. but image ads had much higher click through rate, and text ads took us a lot of money for impression, and click though rate was low.

p.s. maybe i'd try it again, but not soon

 

[madpiano]

I wouldn't run a FB ad if someone paid me for it nowadays. 95% of the ads I see when I surf FB are scams, cheap products or just plain rubbish. The other 5% are for games. FB ads seem to be the place for people to go when no one else will run their ads for Acai Berries, lottery scams, grant scams and cheap chinese products. It is getting worse by the week and I have long ago given up clicking on any of the ads, even when they do look interesting, as they rarely are what they promise.

 

[Tabitha]

madpiano,

Everyone at FB sees different ads. It is based on the pages you frequent and the groups/pages you belong to. If you frequent soapmakers pages and are members of beauty groups/pages you are likely to get cosmetic ads, etc. If you are getting scams & BS you might want to figure out which pages you are visiting that are targeting you with the trash.

 

[madpiano]

madpiano,

Everyone at FB sees different ads. It is based on the pages you frequent and the groups/pages you belong to. If you frequent soapmakers pages and are members of beauty groups/pages you are likely to get cosmetic ads, etc. If you are getting scams & BS you might want to figure out which pages you are visiting that are targeting you with the trash.

about 70% of the pages I follow are soap makers. The other 30% are a mix of games and some fun groups. I do get some cosmetic ads (the ones where you have to pay to see what they are about, or the housewives invention for white teeth seem to be popular), but a whole load of them are for scamming companies ("you are entitled to a University Grant", "NZ Investors", "Forex cheap here" etc). I don't mind the games ones, as I do play some of those.
Even the decent looking ads for something that looks interesting turn out to be spam most of the time or not what it says on the ad (re-direct, re-direct, re-direct - now you are on a completely different page). I have given up on them...

 

[carebear]

I've clicked on some ads (I wouldn't click the game ones on a bet, though) for hand crafted jewelry and such and really liked what I saw. I didn't buy because I'm on a tight budget (prices go up, salary doesn't ) but I wish I could.

FB customizes that ads, if you let it, to match your profile and such - so it has the potential to get to the right consumers. But I don't know how well it works in actuality.