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Advertising On FaceBook

Posted by Paul B | January 29, 2008 .

As part of my big experiment on PPC/Affiliate marketing I also setup an advertising account with FaceBook. I purposely didn’t write about it in my review because as an advertising network it was so different to the others I’d tried.

Forget Keywords, Think Demographics
The big difference between FaceBook and Adwords, YSM etc is that instead of targeting keywords and phrases you’re targeting a demographic. Select a location, sex, age range, education status, political views and even there relationship status and your ad will only be shown in front of the group of people you select. I’m sure you don’t need my help to point out what sort of potential this has for dating adverts and things like that, it’s also no coincidence that so many of the adverts on FaceBook are dating or education related.

Why Google Have It Right And FaceBook Have It Wrong
I started of only bidding $0.10 for my FaceBook ad, this is where it is cool though, even with such a small amount (I ignored the $0.30-$0.40 recommendation) I was getting 5,000 impressions plus a day. Not bad considering I was targeting a quite small amount of people as well. The problem was though that my CTR was almost non existent. This is where Google have things right and FaceBook don’t. When somebody enters a search into Google thy have an intent, they are actively looking for something. When you sign into your FaceBook page, you’re not actively doing anything. You can have all the ads in the world but if the person isn’t looking for that product then your CTR is going to be very low. This is a large part of the reason why search related traffic always converts so well compared to direct type in or referrals. FaceBook ended up costing me very little (it’s pay-per-click after all) but also returned very little as well.

Where Would I Use FaceBook Advertising
Where I think this has huge potential is for gaining exposure, not so much selling but for getting a name out there. FaceBook receives huge amounts of traffic (that tend not to like clicking on ads). By creating a carefully crafted advert it’s possible to get almost free advertising for a website or product of your choice. You might not directly get the clicks but it’s putting a name or website in front of a lot of people.

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