I ran a short ad campaign on Facebook for a small buisness here in Milwaukee. It was simply a test to see what kind of results could be achieved using Facebook’s advertising capabilities.

The Setup
The company I’m helping offers a service that’s seasonally in demand but isn’t ‘cheap’. The service starts at about $1,000 and the target market, brides-to-be, are constantly barraged with ads. Can targeted Facebook ads be the answer?

As I mentioned in my last post, Facebook ads are particularly effective because the ads can be targeted exactly at the demographics that buy your services or product. Users provide personal information on Facebook that allows advertisers to specifically target site visitors down to a very specific set of attributes coupled with geographic location.

So, I know that every single person that will be exposed to this advertisement on Facebook has a very high probability of needing the services and products I want to market. That can’t be said for mass media advertising. Instead of carpet-bombing the Metro area with traditional advertisements, we’re using a smart bomb to find people online that probably want to buy our service.

For this campaign, I targeted Facebook users with these attributes:

• Female
• Over 18 years old
• Milwaukee Wisconsin area resident
• Engaged to be married

Last, but most importantly, we have a landing page on the company’s website using Google Analytics to track the campaign visitors sent from Facebook. It’s very important to have a landing page that provides a continued experience so you don’t waste the visitors that you receive.

The Results
How does a CPL (Cost Per Lead) of $11, about 1% of a typical sale, sound to you ROI hounds? The two-week campaign brought in 4 leads out of the 100 clicks provided by the Facebook ads. Not bad for a short run.

I had an interesting thought that occurred to me during my analysis. What good is the CTR (click-through-rate) when you know that your audience is the target market and your only paying per click? Does it matter if the ad is delivered to tens of thousands of people but you still get a few clicks that result in a sale?

The benefit of measuring your CTR is to check the ad’s effectiveness in this scenario. For example, my first ad had zero clicks after 2,000 impressions. That’s not too good. So I reworked the headline, tweaked the copy and changed out the picture. The CTR jumped to .3% and the leads began to come in. I’m sure with more effort and a longer engagement, modifying the ads and checking the metrics for improvements could produce even higher results.

Lastly, the other valuable benefit is the responder profiles reporting Facebook offers. This could be a huge boon to marketers that aren’t sure if their current media buys are being placed properly. For example, almost every woman who clicked on the ad was a fan of Grey’s anatomy. This means that Facebook ad profiles for those that clicked on your ad can inform you about what other interests potential customers have. We should run TV spots during the next Grey’s Anatomy! Unfortunately my client couldn’t afford the Grey’s Anatomy television spot buy, but we can add that as a keyword to our Facebook campaign and watch the clicks come in.

The Wrap-up
Advertising on Facebook could be the cost-effective online marketing weapon in your arsenal that can survive the marketing budget cuts. An even more compelling reason to advertise on Facebook is that there are benefits beyond a similar Google CPC campaign.

• You’ll know your ads are being shown to your target market
• You’ll learn information about your audience’s tastes beyond your service/product
• Ads are probably much cheaper per-click then Google adwords

Good luck with your campaign, and if you need help getting your own Facebook advertising campaign started, just drop me a note.

Tags: advertisement, CDL, Facebook, ROI

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.