Many of you will be aware that Facebook has started to push it’s advertising platform in recent months, and certainly as a user of Facebook I have noticed more and more ads appearing. We wanted to take a look at running a few simple campaigns to see what the costs involved were like and how detailed the oft talked about targeting was.
Creating an Facebook ad really is very easy, and is split up into three simple steps.
1. Designing Your Ad
Designing a Facebook Ad
Designing your ad couldn’t really be simpler. Put in a destination URL, a headline, some ad text, and an optional picture and you’re good to go. There are some useful links to best practices, reasons for rejection and a design FAQ on the page also.
For some reason their preview of the ad has a line saying “Phil Boyle likes this” with a thumbs up icon beside it, but this hasn’t appeared any time we’ve seen the ad displayed.
2. Targeting
Targeting A Facebook Ad
Facebook offers some great targeting options, but also leaves some basic ones out. For instance, you can easily target just men or women, just those in a relationship, or even just those who are engaged. This is a great service for anyone in the wedding industry looking to drum up some business!
However, it only allows you to geographically target by country, which will be too coarse for many businesses, especially smaller local businesses.
Similarly, their other targeting filters will be great for certain business types but all but useless for others.
3. Campaign Pricing
Pricing A Facebook Ad
All the usual options are available when it comes to controlling the cost of your campaign, but there are also some things that we find a little strange. You have to set a daily limit, as they bill you every day. There are also no VAT invoices available for your campaigns at the time of writing.
You can choose either CPM or CPC payment for you ad. We went with CPC ourselves. The suggested bids seem to be picked out of thin air, and they are quickly creeping up too, presumably as more advertisers buy up slots. Pay what you want to pay and don’t be afraid to cut your bids. They do offer a decent set of reports so you can analyse what effect changing your bids has.
Our intention with Facebook advertising was primarily to get our brand in front of as many people as possible with as little cost as possible, and to that end it has been pretty successful. We’ve had coming up to 9,000,000 impressions on our ads and spent less than €900, and that was just targeting Ireland!
So, in summary, if Facebook’s targeting can identify any niche that your business is interested in, it could well be a useful advertising platform for you to explore. For the rest of us it’s probably just a good way to get some cheap name recognition going.
We don’t have a product or sale as a goal of our Facebook advertising, but if you do we’d love to hear how you have gotten on with it and whether you think it has been a success or not, and any other thoughts people have on social network advertising.
Hi Phil,
Facebook provides an opportunity to ‘like’ an ad. If you do this, the “Phil Boyle likes this” appears next to the ad when it appears on a Facebook friends adspace.
So it’s a form of personal recommendation.
It’s labelled as ’social actions’ somewhere in the build process.
@ Philip Boyle
The CPC seems very high, I found it much better to lowball it at 0.1/0.2 and increase as needed until a fair balance is found.
Did you split test copy & creative at all?
The CPC in the screenshot is the suggested CPC from Facebook. We were paying around 25 cent initially and dropped this to 15 cent. At that point they stopped showing our ads, so we upped the bids to 18 cent and now we get some traffic most days, and very little on others.
We’re not looking to improve CTR rates for the ads we’re showing right now. The campaign is running more as an experiment about what is currently possible and what the minimum costs to run it would be.
Rest assured that we’d be testing copy and creative if it were a big results driven campaign. Right now it’s just a cheap way to get our name in front of a lot of people.
Hey John, that makes sense. How are you finding Facebook advertising yourself – getting good ROI?
Do I spot a nice typo in the ad copy?
“Get a quote and book and appointment today.”
Eagle eyes there Richard. Luckily it’s not a real ad, just one I typed up to get a screen shot for the blog post. Less haste, more speed next time!
Were you happy with CTR?
Mine were around 0.04%. Fair enough I was getting “my brand in front of as many people as possible” with well over 1 mill page views but I just don’t really rate that.
Conversions to newsletter signups were costing about 1Euro.
I’m in mixed minds about FB ads. People just don’t want to be interupted while “socialising” I feel. Also banner ads are really the blind spot at this stage and largely ignored.
I do however feel that if your business is online that your advertising needs to be online also.
My own site trys to focus more on the single ad every week and create a bit of a “buzz” but it would be a LONG time before I’d get to 9 million pages views!
Our CTR rates ranged from the staggeringly low rate of 0.005% up to an equally unimpressive 0.045% across a selection of ads for different clinic types.
We’re not tracking any conversion data for these ads as it is mainly an experiment in minimum cost per click and what number of impressions we can get for as little money as possible.
In the long run, if we decide to explore it as a source of valuable traffic for our site we’ll put a lot of effort into managing our ad copy, the images and trying to optimise our CTR.
I’d agree about advertising online if your business is online, and I’m not sure about advertising on social networks either. Certainly, if I was going to try to drive some traffic through advertising, AdWords, Yahoo and Bing would be the first places I’d turn to.
Same here Philip – very much just testing the waters.
On a related matter, this blog is a fantastic source of help for start-up businesses. Well done with it, and thanks for continuously pumping out such valuable information.
Considering there’s only 1m users of facebook in Ireland, I wonder what effect banner blindness had after 9m impressions. Did you change the ad at all?
We had 6 different ads running for 6 different clinic types on RevaHealth.com:
Dentists, Doctors, Plastic Surgery, Beauty, Hair Loss and Laser Eye, although only two of those accounted for over 8 million of the 9 million impressions so far!
We’ll change the ads if we decide to continue with using Facebook advertising in the medium to long term.