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Results From My Facebook Ad Campaign
On November 20th I setup an advertising campaign on Facebook for my startup, CloudContacts. The ad setup program crashed a few times but eventually I was able to get the ad running. I selected men and women from 25 to 53 with a college degree as my initial test audience. Facebook told me that there were somewhere about 33 million users for the demographics I selected. Clearly this 33 million number is just profiles they have, not actual activity.
Here are the campaign results:
- 81k impressions (majority of them in the first 7 days, nearly none since)
- 6 clicks total for a .01 ctr
- $3.23 total spent
I setup the campaign at $10/day and a $0.61/click cap. This click cap came from Facebook’s suggestion, I didn’t cange it. So I offered Facebook $300 and they took $3.23. Worth $15 billion?
Perhaps I’d see a better response rate if my ads were similar to these:
When I see these type of ads over and over, it really drives the point home that no "legit" ad will work on that right panel. The more acai berry diet ads one sees, the more they tune out (i.e. ad blindness) that entire section of the page. When I created my ad, it took some time to be approved. Yet many of these diet ads use celebrities names but the pages they point to don’t mention the celebs at all and most seem to be affiliate sites.
While I get that people updating their Facebook status or posting a photo from the bar last night might not be in the proper mindset for my service, it’s really a bit shocking just how poorly the ad has performed.
I would have assumed by now that Facebook would have contacted me with tips on adjusting my ad to work towards better performance. They have left $300 on the table — while not much in the small picture, what happens when you start to multiply it out with all of their advertisers. Facebook has such a great opportunity to create a rock-solid social advertising program but instead they would rather slap run-of-network bottom of the barrel display ads and local diet ads on the service. Perhaps the tough economic times we are facing (and will face) will get Facebook to start really investing time into creating an ad platform that works.
Next week I will share the results of my test Google AdWords campaign.
Update: Drama 2.0 has a good post about Facebook employees selling their shares.
Its all about the ad attractivness!!!!
I am Mr Adam Cole i am the managing director of Nigeria finance and we offer people loan of all kind and interest rate is 5% kindly contact us at: nigeriafinance@sify.com
My FB experience has been remarkably good so far. I’m selling half-acre building lots, so my conversions aren’t buying a $50 item — all I’m looking for is a sign-up with contact information and “send more information.” I targeted FB users 35 and over with a specific set of water-related interests (boating, watersports, etc. — the property is waterfront). The clicks cost about 29 cents each as compared with about $1.20 on Google; the conversion rate is about 5% compared with 1.35% for Google CPC.
I have no idea why the Facebook ad is working so well. I’m still spending a lot more on Google than on FB because there’s a smaller pool of prospects on FB, but for eight bucks a day I’m getting awfully good results.
Hi Allen,
Yep similar experience here.
I purchased some Facebook banner ads this Sunday with the keyword Baseball for the launch of http://www.LiveBaseballChat.com
I set up 3 different campaign words with an upper limit of $50 per campaign with a CPC of 10c per click (lol way under their suggested offer of 50-70c per click).
The banners were displayed a total of 27,105 times in 48 hours.
It only cost me 60c because only 6 people actually clicked on it – basically to get name recognition of http://www.LiveBaseballChat.com that is an absolute bargain. Was I disappointed more people didn’t click on it? Sure . But at the end of the day the banner add is out there and more people are likely to check in to the http://www.LiveBaseballChat.com website next time they are watching a baseball game – which for my 60c investment is just fine by me.
How are Facebook making money when people aren’t clicking on their ads? I don’t know.
Regards,
Dean Collins
http://www.LiveBaseballChat.com
facebook has no clue – soon they will be in big trouble because they have no leaderships
I never click on any of the ads on facebook. Something about that site just makes me not want to click on any of the ads, no matter how targeted they are. Thank you for posting your results. I’ve always wondered if anyone was making any money from ads on facebook.
Cheers,
Rafael
Facebook is a great young company. They just need to have a better analysis on what EXACTLY it is people are doing on the site. The inbox, for example, is a perfect opportunity to help small businesses connect with each other on specific projects. They have so many opportunities it is staggering, but hopefully Zuckerberg takes his time and figures out the right ones (I think he will).
Hey Allen, We also just started our ad campaign at Facebook and we share the same sentiments you have.
Facebook did not do a good job giving its users a decent platform that will at least rival 50% of Google Adwords.
At first, we followed Facebook’s bid suggestion. Then after a few days of non-performance we sent an email to their sales team. They suggested that we increase our bids to get more impressions and clicks. So, why doesn’t FB’s auto bid suggestion worked at first?
BTW, we also get the same graph as yours. Up and crash, up and down never consistent.
One last complaint – their reporting tool is subpar. You would think these smart people would do a better job at that.
Oh by the way, we now have more than 1,200,000 impressions and only 100 clicks. That is like less than 0.03 CTR.
AJ
Thanks for the reply AJ – I believe Facebook should be spending time making sure that every ad is performing as good as it can be – why wouldn’t they?
Hey Allen,
Disappointed to read your results. We’re having a vastly different experience, although I think our approach maximises the power of the Facebook ad platform.
By identifying and targeting a far greater number of *smaller* audiences – what we refer to as micro-targeting – and then writing relevant copy to each of those groups, we have acheived some exceptional CTRs.
For example, for a US movie release over the summer we averaged over 0.10%, and many of the target groups and ad combinations attracted over 1.00% CTRs. We were also able to tell the studio concerned which of the casts’ fans were most responsive, and what they looked like demographically.
Similarly for a UK TV show from one of the major broadcasters, we again averaged over 0.10% for the entire campaign, and had small number of groups over 1.00%, and probably a dozen target groups acheiving over 0.20% CTR.
We have been abe to repeat this for other clients too and across various industry types, which leads that the approach is right
Our clients are very happy to rebook with us too. In many instances the results they are getting from us are *cheaper* even than the traffic they buy through Google PPC.
If anyone wants us to look at their campaigns, then I’m richard at techlightentmentdotcom
BTW – I share all your frustrations at the platform, but we’re too pig-headed to let any of the short-comings stop us!!
Thanks for the reply Richard – perhaps you should post a case study with examples and so forth – could be a good selling point for your firm.
Richard: it’s unclear from your comment what the goal of the campaigns you’re running are.
1. Are you simply looking to identify which “audiences” are interested in an ad in an effort to help your clients determine which audiences they should be reaching out to elsewhere?
This would strike me as a little bit odd in the case of movie studios since most studios do extensive work with test audiences even in the pre-production stages of a new movie’s development. In fact, changes to the movie itself (sometimes substantial) are often made before and during production to ensure that the movie is most appealing to the target audiences. By the time a movie is released, test audiences, focus groups and surveys have already established which audiences the movie is most likely to appeal to. As such, I can’t imagine that they’re paying significant amounts of money to place ads on Facebook so that they can determine who’s interested in their movie. They already know.
2. Are you simply looking to drive traffic for your clients without any further success metrics? If so, would you care to reveal what type of scale we’re talking about with your larger campaigns?
3. Are you looking to drive traffic that in turn leads to some other measurable action that’s of value to your clients?
You note that “In many instances the results they are getting from us are *cheaper* even than the traffic they buy through Google PPC.”
I would point out that cheap does not always mean “effective.” If you’re looking for traffic to lead to some tangible, measurable action, you’ll often find that traffic that is more “expensive” on the surface is actually most *cost-effective*.
For instance, let’s assume that 1000 clicks costs you $100 on Facebook and 1000 clicks costs you $250 on AdWords. Facebook is cheaper right? Well, if your goal is to sell widgets and Facebook generates 1 sale and AdWords generates 3, your CPA for Facebook is $100 and your CPA for AdWords is $83. AdWords is really $16 cheaper when it comes to the bottom line.
Any clarification you feel comfortable providing would be welcomed since your comment seems to be heavy on the results you’ve achieved with CTRs even though CTRs are usually the least important metric when analyzing the success of a campaign. Obviously, if nobody clicks your ad, poor CTRs are very problematic but clicks in and of themselves are usually the means, not the ends.
I’ve had mixed results in the campaigns I’ve run. It’s nice to be able to target a specific segment so easily.
I wanted to advertise a small scholarship my family wanted to award to my old high school. Facebook made it easy to identify the users (micro-targeting) but I was disappointed in the CTR (0.05%). Facebook certainly left money on the table.
Maybe that’s just to be expected when people on more interested in facebook tasks/content.
Great forum topic.
–
Sean
Should bear in mind that average CTR’s are under 0.05% for all advertising on Facebook. We can ascertain this from the ranges provided for Cost per click and Cost per view. Facebook optimise to maximise their CPM, of course.
Yesterday I looked and it was suggesting about 0.046% as an average CTR. So in that context, 0.05% is not as bad as it might seem.
Richard
“There is no reliable service that tracks CPM or CTR. CTR is highly subject to creative effectiveness which is very campaign specific, while CPM is so dynamic no compilation would be reliable. ” – IAB
http://www.iab.net/about_the_iab/faq#17
I’ve been buying Facebook ads for almost a year and have had very similar experiences. They’re very effective at targeting certain demos BUT the admin tool is awful (for example, we couldn’t get corp. credit cards to work at all), there’s no optimization, poor reporting, strange moderation rules and awful service. Google is about 50-times better right now. Maybe Facebook should just do an ad deal with Google and let them sell the ads for them…
Had the same experience. We took ads crafted for Google Adwords, narrowed down the audience to the most micro we could given FB’s targeting constraints and launched. 200K impressions in the first two days, .01% CTR, 20 clicks, stopped campaign and moved on to other options.
The ads were very tailored in terms of messaging and spent some $200,000 a month on Google, but we couldn’t throw money at FB.
They have a ton of data to work with – I think they’ll improve and come out with a decent ad platform eventually. But user mindset on FB is much closer to that of people on email (communicating) than when they are reading content (or certainly than when looking for something on search). This indicates to me there will always be some inherent audience attention deficit when trying to break through with ads on FB. Their CTRs are really like what you see when advertising on a Hotmail or Yahoo Mail with random banners.