Barry Hand

Now there’s some­thing I com­pletely for­got about, Damien Mul­leys Face­book Ad thingy, I actu­ally stum­bled across Gor­don Murray’s blog, he had also done some test­ing on Face­book. Luck­ily I did set aside a folder of assets, notes and stats.

So I went slightly over bud­get (yeah I for­got to pause the cam­paign) and ended up spend­ing $117.56, but for pur­poses of shar­ing the love, here’s the key points

• CPC bet­ter than CPM
• Don’t trust sug­gested bid/spend
• Relevant/Targetted works best
• The time taken by Face­book to approve Irish Ads is annoying
• Only use­ful when you have some­thing rel­e­vant to offer after click

First of all I knew I would get high click through rates, as I was adver­tis­ing my Dublin Movie Club (the face­book group not the web­site)

Here’s a quick run down, details might be lack­ing as I’m just going from my rough notes of 3 months ago.

1. Ad Setup
As I was adver­tis­ing a Group which is on Face­book, adding the ‘Social Actions’ really helped the viral aspect of the Ad. If some­one on your friend list has joined what­ever you are pro­mot­ing — a small endorse­ment appears beside the ad show­ing that they’ve joined. Nifty eh?

I set most of my ads up on a CPC basis, start­ing with the minu­mum amount, and rais­ing by $0.02c when required to trig­ger enough impres­sions, this ensured low­est pos­si­ble cost per click. If I had of used CPM on my most suc­cess­ful ad, I would have paid around around 120% more.

Face­book rec­om­mended around $0.95c for clicks, while I started at $0.05c and worked up, in CPM ads it’s a sim­i­lar case, start low and work up until you hit a point where you are get­ting low cost clicks.

Unlike Adwords, I’m not sure if there is enough pub­lished details to take into account ad per­for­mance or even any­thing sim­i­lar to the Adwords qual­ity score and rank­ing algo­rithm, but it’s a bit of a shot in the dark.

2. Ad Con­tent
I played around with var­i­ous types of ads, not nearly as much as I wanted, when using other ad sys­tems like Google Adwords, I would cre­ate vari­a­tions of an ad with sin­gle dif­fer­ences to deter­mine which was more suc­cess­ful. Frankly the turn­around on get­ting ads approved was almost a day, and I wasn’t pre­pared to do that only to find an ad or vari­a­tion had been rejected.

It’s worth not­ing that who­ever approves the ads are not work­ing on GMT or Euro­pean time, that’s some­thing to bear in mind if you ever wanted to cre­ate a quick reac­tion ad to some­thing top­i­cal. Cre­ate your ad and wait the 12+ hours for it to go live, hmmm — maybe with face­book oper­a­tions open­ing in Dublin this will improve.

The group were head­ing to 2 movies dur­ing the test period, both which were visu­ally strong in image ads, and hey it also helps if one of them is ‘The Dark Knight’

3. Ad Tar­get­ting
With no effec­tive method of tar­get­ting region­ally, which would obvi­ously help my movie group based in Dublin, I toyed with ads tar­get­ted to Dublin col­leges, com­pa­nies, movie related inter­ests, but in the end — I decided to leave it run­ning gen­er­ally as the cost was low and I was tired mak­ing ad vari­a­tions

4. Got clicks, and then what?
The pri­mary goal of the ad cam­paign was to get peo­ple to join the face­book group (which in turn helps CTR with the social actions I men­tioned ear­lier), and the sec­ondary goal of get­ting them to signup to the website.

In terms of mea­sur­ing group mem­ber joins, Face­book insights doesn’t show this, but from the 438 clicks I got dur­ing that period, 93 vis­i­tors were referred from Face­book, of which 21% (or 20 peo­ple) con­verted into new signups.

On my face­book group ‘land­ing page’ I don’t hugely pro­mote the web­site link, merely pro­vide it, so this kind of stat is very encour­ag­ing. Imag­ine if this was a prod­uct or ser­vice, which was rel­e­vant and we were see­ing 20 new signups/purchases even after an unop­ti­mised land­ing page which doesn’t really pro­mote the con­ver­sion

5. Con­clu­sion
The lack of report­ing from Face­book is being addressed with new cam­paigns report­ing on social clicks and impres­sions. The time taken to get an ad approved hasn’t changed for me yet.

Face­book is really good at deliv­er­ing low cost traf­fic, mix it up with a good social pre­cence and rel­e­vant tar­get­ting and it is some­thing which works really well.

Here’s some shots of the other ads used.