After many talks with myself, I went crazy and decided to check out Facebook Advertising.
As you know, I’m a huge direct mail fan. I love everything to do with offline marketing… you know, like postcards, sales letters, newspaper ads (yes, you read that right), really anything to do with offline.
But, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about with Facebook Advertising. I’ve heard of people who don’t get anything, and then I’ve met people who make six figures running ads on Facebook so I decided to give it a shot.
I only did it one campaign for 10 days with an ad driving to a real estate marketing strategies webpage on my site (obviously, I was targeting real estate agents).
I reached a total of 8,768 people. Only received 9 clicks to my website (that’s 0.1%… a tenth of one percent). Not good. Also, I didn’t really spend any money. I’ve heard from others that say you need to do at least $10 ad budget a day or more. I did $2.50/day just to see how it works.
Here’s a screenshot of the results and of the ad:
One thing I want to mention about the number of people reached, 8,768, is… it’s just an impression. It doesn’t mean someone actually looked at your ad. It just means it was on someone’s screen while they were on Facebook. Sometimes I don’t even notice the sidebar ads on Facebook, but, every time one shows up it’s counted as an impression.
So, it’s not like postcards where even if the prospect is going to toss it into the trash, they still see your message, even if it’s for a millisecond.
Now, I wanted my ad to be different than what you see above, but Facebook has many rules you need to follow, which I didn’t like. One, you can’t have a picture with more than 20% of the picture being words. Ugh! So, I used one of their stock photos.
Actually, I picked a better stock photo they offered me, but the ad was declined because they said the picture had more than 20% words. Funny… they’re the ones who offered the stock photo to me! Oh well…
Onwards.
You can’t control the main web address on your ad (see mine is dukeofmarketing.com). I would have never EVER written it like that. I would have capitalized the first letter in each word to make it easier to read so it looks like DukeOfMarketing.com. But, that option wasn’t there.
One thing really nice with Facebook advertising is it’s really easy to track! You can direct prospects who click on your ad to a specific page on your website or landing/squeeze page. That way you know where prospects are coming from.
Oh, and you can split test. So, you can make up two different ads and they’ll be rotated so you can see which ad pulls in more clicks. Though, I did try that option, again, the pictures I wanted to use weren’t allowed. Oh well.
I wasn’t really happy with Facebook ads, especially with all their restrictions. Though, their system was easy to use, and there are a ton of different demographics you can target, Facebook advertising isn’t for me. Oh, and if you decide you want to change your budget, or change one little thing with your ad then Facebook has to re-approve it which could take a couple hours each time. Ugh!
So, I ask you, have you ever used Facebook Advertising? What kind of success did or didn’t you have?
Be sure to leave your answers in the comments below.
Now go take action!