Facebook PPC Attempt 1

July 21st, 2008 by Evan Hood

Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are another PPC venue worth attempting. Facebook sees more than 30 million unique visitors per month, which means a lot of impressions and a lot of clicks. Facebook works a lot similar to the other search engines except for a few things.

Facebook Ads vs. Other Search Engines

Ability to include a picture in the ad
No quality score (…..sort of)
Audience of mainly highschool/college students
Poor ad management interface
No keywords (….sort of)

Facebook has a fairly targeted demographic already. Most of its users are young to middle age high school or college students (but that demographic is changing as the college students on Facebook graduate and continue to keep in touch via this social medium). If you can find offers that would interest this crowd (iPods, video games, partying, other social offers) you might have a winner. Facebook also has no real quality score to speak of. However, just like other search engines, they’re there to turn a profit. If your CTR sucks, Facebook makes no money so they crank up your minimum bid. Facebook also lets you include a picture in your ad which brings a whole different element to marketing (think distinct colors, hot girls, cars, pictures of money). You can target certain “interest” words in viewers profiles (only show my ad to people who list “cigarettes” in their interests), much like keywords but you don’t want to limit your audience so I often leave this out. Lastly, their ad management interface sucks. Once you create an ad you can’t change much about it. You can’t change the destination URL, the picture, or even which ad group it’s in. So to tweak anything you have to create a whole new ad and wait the 24 some odd hours before the ad starts running.

First Attempt

At first I picked out a few ads that I thought might convert. Just about every ad I see while I’m on Facebook is a dating site. So, rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll go along with the crowd. Also, I was recently a college student, and I love coffee. I also love cheap stuff. So I grabbed a Gevalia coffee offer ($3 for 3 bags of “premium” coffee and a travel mug. I’d do it) as well. So I set up 2 ads for each offer and then created the same 2 offers for about 2-3 different age and sex demographics. I put in a bid at the low end of the range and let it go. Results? You guessed it.

Fail

Gevalia Coffee: 0 conversions
Singles Dating Site: 3 conversions
Net Loss: About $50

Learning Time

What went wrong here? Conversions were low, possibly because the coffee offer isn’t relevant to our target audience and the dating site probably failed because of market saturation. My click through rates were abysmally low so Facebook made my minimum bid so high that it wasn’t worth it. Also having “free” in my ads is worth looking into. Seems to trigger a lot of other search engines’ alarms.

Tweaking For Second Attempt: