The lifeblood of the Internet is Pay per Click advertising that is dominated by companies like Google’s Ad Words. Google exploited the data it collected for years spurring a new type of practice called Search Engine Marketing. On a per click basis you could get your ad to show up in the SERPs of relevant searches.
As the Facebook network became larger, eventually becoming the largest social network on the Internet, it became apparent that the information collected from users became a valuable targeted method for advertisers. For instance if your company sells aftermarket parts for hot rods you can target Facebook users who are interested in Racing, are Male, between the ages of 22 and 52, and make over $50,000 per year. The targeting itself makes Facebook ads an interesting proposition.
I have overseen a couple of marketing campaigns that utilized both Ad Words and Facebook’s advertising campaigns. It’s a good idea to dedicate as much time as possible to one of these campaigns because having better click through percentages will actually get you a lower rate on advertising. During my latest campaign for my Facebook page I measured my success in Likes per $, and ended up with over 500 likes for 50$. The campaign was a major success because the users who ended up liking my page usually shared some of the content and got another friend or two to like it as well.
I started out offering .50$ per click through and targeted the categories I wrote for at Yahoo! By the end of the campaign I was only paying a fraction of that per click through and was generating several more conversions by offering targeted content that ended up being shared.
The problems with Facebook advertising became apparent later when Facebook itself altered their algorithm and my 500+ likes that were generating nearly 500 unique impressions with each message dropped to a rate of generating only 120 unique impressions per message (probably related to individual user settings and the amount of interaction they had with my page).
You see, Facebook urges you to use your Fan Page as the target for their ads. Until recently anyone who was a fan or liked your page would see your updates just as they see the updates from their friends. As users started liking more and more pages it became necessary to limit the exposure each message would get. It would have been a much better idea to use an independent web page that allowed me to attempt to get e-mail addresses for future contact than to use my Facebook page where future messages would not be heard.
Facebook themselves don’t want brands to get immeasurable value from fan pages. If you could reach all interested users with a status update, there is really no reason to buy Facebook ads other than to generate new likes.
The aspects of Facebook advertising that need to be looked into is whether a user on Facebook who was targeted by me through various demographics will actually break away from Facebook long enough after they click my ad for me to make an impact or generate a sale. It isn’t good business to buy ad space on a platform that you end up competing with, and that is essentially what Facebook is. Their user numbers are inflated by dummy accounts, and their ads don’t deliver in quite the way you’d expect. One of the most astonishing aspects is that Facebook’s control over their users is so overreaching that after I develop a page with useful content, Facebook generates an income from the ads displayed on that page. It takes balls to be able to get a billion users to generate content for your profit, but that’s basically what has happened.
Since the trend is to make brand pages less effective to elicit further advertisement, I only see the problem getting worse as Facebook’s programming becomes more sophisticated. As more and more 3rd party developers include the Facebook API in their programs and applications, Facebook will continue to collect more and more data on each of their users. So while Facebook uses my data to market me to other companies, my content to generate page views for their advertisements, and take my money while planning on how to render the results of my campaign ineffective, I just let them because they’re Facebook and if I want to reach EVERYONE, I have to play ball. What do you think about the monster we’ve created?
Excellent info. Well done!
Twitter: sallykwitt
Hi Adam, I like this article very much and found it most informative. I have followed you on my main twitter account and re-tweeted it. The mission you posted was over by the time I found it however it a great article and important information for all of us, Please remember to follow mr back on twitter.com/rictownsend as I have an automated un-follow system as that particular stream has about 190,000 followers and its the only way I can manage it. Once again, great article and thank you for the heads up Ric-orglearn
Twitter: rictownsend
You do make some valid points Adam. I hadn’t really gave it that much though before. In the past I’ve used Facebook ads with much success, but I can see why they wouldn’t be as effective after Facebook’s more recent changes.
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Magic, I actually wrote a case study when I did it, It’s a large part of my newest e-book I just completed writing tonight and will be sending out to my mailing list as the first e-mail. I had great success with the campaign, I used articles I had written as context to lure targeted users across 4 categories. After I finished I was getting almost as many impressions as I had likes on every post, and that lasted for 2 days until Facebook made a change to where only certain people showed up in your feed (It was way before F8, you may remember it, people where trying to figure out why they were only seeing the posts of just their best friends and were missing a ton of posts). After that I was getting a little over 100 impressions per post, but luckily I was still writing the case study report so I was able to include the change. It ended up becoming a theme with Facebook. After watching f8 and reading some strategies Facebook had to improve user adverts I realized that they probably didn’t want Pages to be as valuable as they possibly could be.
I would assume that the advertisements are still a very good way to target leads, but I also question if users are likely to go off on a tangent when they probably just got online to check their Facebook messages. I’m considering setups for a all to action page especially made for someone coming from Facebook, since you’ve had some experience with FB ads, any ideas?
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That call to action pages doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all. I don’t have any ideas on it currently. I’m still trying to figure out how to utilize Facebook to it’s maximum potential. Previously I had just used ads targeted towards users who had liked certain artist pages and sent them back to my Facebook page.
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Twitter: magictrax
Adam, there is a 3rd type of landing page that should be considered when using facebook ads, an email capture page deployed directly on facebook. By using a 3rd party service like Shortstack or Aweber, you are able to combine the best parts of an offsite landing page (i.e. email capture etc) with the benefits of driving people to your facebook page. By having your capture page as a part of your facebook fanpage, you can lower cpc cost (FB gives a discount for keeping people on facebook) and the potential that you will gain BOTH a new facebook fan and an email address.
Twitter: cjshaffer1
In most cases, social media isn’t going to be an effective way to generate sales-ready leads. It is, however, a good way to catch people early in the process and build social proof.
Interesting article Adam. Good stuff.
Twitter: ThomHolland
this stuff is awsm…!!!! grt….rumormag.com
Now,this is great info !! I comepletely agree with you
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Recommended read, Advertising is one of the keys to success