Are You Using FaceBook Ads to Promote Your Business?

I too have been thinking about doing this. It seems pretty easy to implement.

Great topic for discussion! I was excited to see what everyone else had to say but it looks like I’m early, so I’ll start it off. I did the exact same as you, I started with the freebie $25 ad on facebook and got similar results. Lots of impressions, a few clicks, nothing too exciting. I pointed mine toward my fan page, and I did end up with a few new fans but no emails from it. I was considering trying a new ad and creating it’s own unique landing page on my site.

I’ve also done the same on LinkedIn and had quite a few impressions and clicks, but no emails either. Would love to hear from someone that’s been successful with it. Perhaps we just need to give it more time and try more options. More options will probably be my next step. Cheers!

I’ve been thinking about getting into Facebook ads also. I assumed they would have higher conversion rates because of how much information they have on their users that you could really target a specific audience. I look forward to hearing about your next campaign with them and to see what other readers’ experiences have been like.

Well, i hope the facebook ads you are talking about in this article pointed to brandscaping.ca because then it would not be the ads fault, it would be brandscaping.ca:s fault, it isnt exactly appeticing.

I have used Facebook ADS before my myself and my clients as well.

I have mixed feeling. The ADS are showing up depending on the client profile and sometimes it’s not possible to target the right people.

The other thing I have noticed is that is is better to use the pay per impression vs. the pay per click business model.

Worth continue testing but really tricky to get decent conversions (depending on what your clients are selling)…

I’m happy to read a review about the PPC Facebook ads. The only one I’ve tried is DeviantArt’s. I was able to generate a lot of business from them and also gain lots of website hits (and DeviantArt page views). They’re a bit expensive, but in the end, I was able to make a profit from it.

I have also been thinking of using that $25.00 credit to do an ad campaign…I would be interested in hearing about your successes or failures from your 2nd campaign…

That’s interesting, we were just talking about using our facebook credit today. I’m curious to see how it works. It is indeed a very targeted audience, but on the other hand, its different from google where you have people actively searching for your keywords.

I briefly tried Facebook ads when I first launched ThemeJam. I had a similar experience as you – very low CTR. I doubt it even turned any theme sales.

I’m considering another shot at FB ads to promote the relaunch of my blog in a few weeks. We’ll see…

Curious to hear experiences / tips from others…

Nice post! This is my experience:

I run the Facebook accounts of some of my clients. This has given me some experience using FB ads and what I can say is that they do work.

What I would suggest is to set a budget according to the results you want to achieve. What I have seen is that low budgets may work better if you are looking for audience awareness about your brand, or if you want to get more fans to your FB Fan Page.

If you are looking for conversions, then you will probably need to invest a bit more. No need to invest hundreds of dollars a day, but maybe in your whole campaign.

Another important thing is to make several variations of your ad. In that sense Facebook works similar to Adwords. You create a campaign and then you can create several ads pointing to the same product/service you are selling.

I use to make several ads: from the most corporate/serious ones to the most funny/singular ones (always considering the client´s brand guidelines of course). Then I run them for a couple days, check the results and make some tweaks here and there according to what the CTR and number of impressions is telling me.

For example, some time ago I had to make a campaign for a Public Speaking Course. I thought the most corporate looking ads would be the most effective ones. I was wrong. The most effective ad was one featuring an incredibly funny face of a scared man (in reference to public speaking fear).

So, what I´m trying to say here is that each product/service is different, and you have to find your own path to success based on the results you get, analyze them, make changes and go on. And the best way to do this is by jumping into the pool and testing the service.

Hope you find this useful! Best of lucks!

I have run ads on Google, Bing, Linkedin and Facebook. I’ll give a quick run down on all four:

Google – Most of our traffic is through Google and I have experimented with CPC and CPA. CTR is usually between 0.80 (content network) and 1.9% (Search). Average Cost per acquisition is in the $3-5 range. Traffic is consistent and budget is easy to manage. Most traffic is driven to “buy” (sign-up for trial in our case).

Bing – MSAdcenter is similar to Google’s but I found that CTR and Impression counts were very very low. CPC had a lower cost than Google, but there seemed to be so little traffic.

LinkedIn – Advertising for the very rich. Ran a campaign for 48 hours on Linkedin for a total of 2 clicks, zero sign-ups and over $30.00 USD. I found some blog posts with similar results.

Facebook – Low CPC, high amount of impressions, great targeting ability, incredibly low CTR. I stopped running ads here as well due to the very low CTR and very low sign up rate from the clicks the site saw.

I think that advertising on FB (and Linkedin) depend highly on what you are advertising. People are mostly there to socialize so I think a lot of ads get ignored. It’s just not the place a lot of people look for things to buy, as opposed to a Google/Bing/Yahoo! search. At least FB is cheap enough to experiment with and not blow your budget. LinkedIn, not so much.

I’m also about to run a campaign with Influads, based in Denmark (ads runs on North American and European sites). We’re guaranteed a minimum amount of impressions, and if our Google CTR and sign-up rates hold, we should see some savings over our Google campaign.

Hopefully that helps with more info to add to the article.

-Brian

Hi Jason,

thanks for your article. Actually, I have tried Facebook’s ads before. It seem not to work with me. I don’t know the reason, but it didn’t work as expected. That’s why I stopped after >$30 was paid.

I think the reason of my failure on Facebook’s ads was my content. Do you have any suggestion for writing an ad’s content?

Hey,

I am a photographer and I often used Facebook ads. The key is knowing your target market I think. If you are looking for corporate work, Facebook will not be the best medium for that. I was looking for more bookings in engagement sessions and possibly weddings. A target market of people in their 20′s and early 30′s… which Facebook is crowded with. You can target your ad specifying you want to show it to people in a relationship only if I am correct, together with a geographic restriction, this narrows down to a very specific group which proved ideal for me…

Photographer Rod Evans has very interesting training packages available on Facebook marketing. Not only the paid ads, but also on Facebook in general…

Roeland

I haven’t dabbled enough into campaigns, but I’ll offer my two cents.

My ad was to get people to like our business fanpage, and I ran the ad about four times for a total of ten days ($50 campaign, all free though since I had an ad credit). Never changed the ad yet. Within those ten days, I had about 119,000 impressions, 133 clicks, and about a 0.112% CTR.

I don’t know if this is below average, average, or above average or not. And I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I’d say about… half of those clicks resulted in additional fans. (I really don’t remember, so don’t quote me. I just remember that every day I ran the ad, we’d get a steady stream of new fans vs when the ad wasn’t running). So for someone who only had friends on their fanpage at the beginning, I think we did pretty good.

I did a very narrow demographic too (instead of applying the ad to everyone).

But conversions that result in sales do depend on more than just the ad itself. It depends on your message and where your ad takes the visitor. What offer is in front of them. If they like the content on your wall. If your target audience is of the ‘ready to buy’ type or if they need more of a softer approach. Ect.

I like our current ad. It reads: “Small business stress overwhelming you? Come visit the cottage. We give you tea, biscuits, and non-sleazy ways to market your products.” And I’ll probably run it again in the future as is. I’m a copywriter, though, so maybe that gives me a leg up in PPC campaigns.

Hi,

Interesting article – I’ve weighed up all the options discussed as I’m trying to market a business stuck in a overly saturated market – photography relating to the city of Liverpool (any way you can stick out past the Beatles and the two football clubs is welcome!) – didn’t do massively well with Google and have been wondering about Facebook.

Quick question – where does everyone keep getting the Facebook coupon from?

Regards,

Mark

I haven’t paid for advertising ever, have you noticed an increase in your business through facebook or would linkedin?

I wouldn’t expect very good results on facebook for myself. But I should spend the credit just to see I suppose.

Having experimented with FB ads in the past. I think pointing to a website is very hit and miss, they click on your ad, look for a few seconds and close the browser.

Net result: a hit in analytics, a few pence off your FB budget and not a lot more to show for it. Bad times.

In my opinion, the only way FB Ads work is when they are linked to a FB fan page. You can quickly create a community who may share your page with their friends, if not their ‘like’ of your page is displayed on their wall anyway.

Net result: a ready made, ever growing list to communicate with via your page. Good times.

Hey Jason,

Generally speaking you want to test at least 200 clicks before you even look at the results of any advertising. Lower and you risk over analysis.

Also you can target on much more than geography, try targeting people that like terms such as “small business” etc your ideal customers. Although I don’t think facebook is a great place for freelance advertisers. People use facebook to talk to friends, it’s completely different to searched based advertising like google adwords.

Driving people back to a facebook page for your business will result in the user being a lot less disorientated and it’s a lot smaller jump for them to click “like” if they like your content. From there build the relationship with more helpful content and work will come.

Once people like your business page you can target them with ads on facebook, you can also target the friends of people who like your business.

Hope this helps :>

I have recently created a couple of ads for FB and I have to say I am a little dissapointed and here are my reasons why;

First of all I find that the number of clicks FB charges me for do not relate to any of the site analytics. I am using both google analytics and statcounter. Where FB tell me that I am getting about 60+ clicks per day, Google and statcounter both tell me that I am only getting between 10-15. I was thinking that perhaps users do not wait for the page to load before returning to FB, so I put the analytics codes on the top of the page so they are about the first things to run, but still no joy. My figures tell me that I am only getting 1/5th to 1/8th of the traffic FB charges me for.

The second is to do with the targeting. I have one campaign where I am trying to target users in Mexico. FB tells me that 56 people clicked, Google tell me that 9 clicked and that 4 of the came from Mexico and 5 came from the US. Well, I can understand that FB has no control over where its users claim to be geographicaly, but this does not really help me when I specificaly want users in a given country.

On the plus side, I did run another campaign a while back trying to get more “friends” for a fan page and there the conversions were pretty close to 100% of what FB was claiming ie the report would say 30 people clicked and 25 would actually join.

Has anyone else had any similar experiences?

I got a little too happy right after I launched my website, and ran ads on Google AdWords and Facebook. I only did campaigns of a couple of days each after experimenting with different CPC bids. Facebook easily got me the most impressions (over 305,000) but like many here, no conversions. Most had a high bounce rate as well. Also my CTR on any of these never broke .031% which seems really low to me.

I might try it again when I have it in the budget, but right now the returns didn’t justify the cost for me.

Seth Godin advises that banners and sponsored ads are a waste of time, but Google ads are genius. The deciding factor is relativity, are your ads making it onto pages used by those who need your services? Or is a 17 year old in Hong Kong getting them when he just wants to know about the latest Xbox releases?

Google Ads are generated by site content, more efficiently targeting your ads. My experience on it is limited, but it looks good in theory….

When you ran your ad did you target the incoming traffic (all 19 clicks) to a focused landing page? I don’t necessarily agree with the previous post that your site is unappetizing, but I do think that you could fine tune your landing content to help drive a conversion. If the ad linked to your home page there really isn’t anything that introduces your business or calls for the visitor to do anything.

I think in all instances of using PPC ads the first step, before even looking for a service, is to examine the conversion architecture of your site and make sure you are driving new visitors directly to the content you want them to see, such as your services page, or even social marketing related promotions such as a discounted rate for a twitter page customization (I only use that example because they are simple to do and are cheap enough for people to take a chance on you if there is a deal). All the traffic in the world won’t help you if you aren’t driving visitors to a specific action.

I have had mixed success with Facebook ads. As a B2B service provider, Facebook ads don’t work very well for my business itself. However, I have managed a few campaigns for some B2C vendors, and those have performed much better.

Personally, my target market is local area small businesses. Just like the comment above about a plumber, it is very difficult to directly target small business owners themselves on Facebook. But why limit yourself to targeting them directly?

Many small business owners are looking for advice from professional coaches and small business advisors. Many of those coaches and advisors (in my experience from the ones I met while working in a public school system where we provided and coordinated such services) use Facebook and tend to list “small business” and “entrepreneurship” in their interests. Those and other related keywords are targetable. This provides an opportunity to market yourself as a local expert to those who provide professional advice and coaching services in your area.

Let me paste something I just read somewhere that may be useful:

When you first create an ad, bid the within suggested amounts. When your ad is approved, usually within an hour or so, keep an eye on the clickthrough rate. This will appear in your stats as soon first few thousands impressions hit, which can be minutes after ad approval. Then adjust your bid down to about 30% of the new lowest suggested bid.

For example, let’s say you bid $0.65 when you first place your ad. Once your ad starts running, if your CTR is decent, click on your current bid and you’ll see a new suggested bid of say, $0.21. I found that I could change my bid to about 35% of that new suggested bid amount, or $.08 and still get impressions. This strategy also seemed to hold true when placing CPM ads. Start high, adjust lower.