After I spoke with Steve Iser, I got hooked on Facebook. His latest book, Ready. Aim. Wired is a great starting place for anyone who wants to understand the nuances of marketing done well in social marketing. Now I am testing out some campaigns in Facebook’s Social Ads. My biggest surprise is their stringent policies regarding approving ads. Below are the ads I have created.
As you can see I am only batting 25% on approvals. The Facebook Social Ads Guidelines are wrtten so a narrow path must be chosen if you are going to get approved. It seems that the process is very subjective to the whims of the editor. I was surprised also at the speed with which approvals (or non-approvals) are sent back. It took only 10 minutes for me to know whether my ad passed the muster or not. I will be ging into more detail on this as I play around in their system, stay tuned…
Mouse over the ads below to see which got approved and which didn’t).
“You are targeting liberal, moderate, and conservative men between 18 and 65 years old who are single, in a relationship, or engaged in the
The results are not all that encouraging though, but I am still in the first week of playing with the system. As of this writing I still hadn’t made a sale. In the first 6 days I have had 39,674 impressions, but only 33 clicks with an average per click cost of $0.25.
You can select how you want to pay for your campaign, either Pay Per Click or a CPM basis. I have chosen to test the PPC method first.I started off at $0.01 and have been moving it up and down to see what this does to the amount of PPC traffic delivered. The most I bid was $0.35 and that increased the amount of impressions drastically. So it performs as the other PPC platforms, in that if you increase your bid, your ad is shown in more places.
As of today I do not see Facebook users acting as buyers, but the testing will continue and hopefully I will be able to crack this space and start to see some real results. From this screenshot, you can see the results aren’t too encouraging, but hey I have only spent $7.00 so far. I’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, buy Steve Iser’s book, Ready. Aim. Wired. You will not be disappointed.
December 3rd, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Hey Jim,
Facebook’s facing some scruntiny right now because the advertising isn’t meeting up to standards for advertisers.
One thing for sure is that they’re still trying to improve on their model.
But who knows, I’ve seen some pretty incredible things happening so far.
Steve
December 13th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
Jim,
In my opinion, folks on video and social networks (youtube, revver, friendster, myspace, facebook)
are early in the buying cycle. So there’re likely to look for more “informational” rather than “transactional” sites.
Hence, your facebook flyers, er, now called Facebook Ads, will probably get higher approval rates (and possibly conversions) if they’re positioned to be “informational” in nature.
Couple that with seductive copywriting or content, and you should see the conversions come in.
I know that bikini-clad women get more clicks, but it may not always be the type of traffic that buys.
I did a post on the buying cycle at:
http://www.whoisandrewwee.com/payperclick-ppc/google-adwords-holiday-profit-tips/
Also, males aged 18-65 looks like a wide range.
I think 18-30 works well for a social site,
and 30-50 might convert well for a paid service.
It’s a matter of matching psychographics/demographics to the necessary action on the backend.