After running Facebook ads for the past few months I’ve noticed a potential trend. Facebook traffic seems to spike on Sunday evenings, which is not typical for website traffic, usually Mondays are the big day for any given week. I thought about my own personal Facebook usage and realized that my wife and I tend to use Facebook for at least 30 minutes Sunday evening as well. Sunday nights have become TGISNFBT (thank goodness it’s Sunday night Facebook time). Ok that acronym might not catch on, but if it does, you heard it here first.

Why the Sunday night blitz?

Facebook is all about connecting with your friends and sharing the fun, or bad, stuff going on in your life. The challenge is that you need time to actually do something in your life to write about. Typically Friday nights, Saturdays, and Sundays are reserved for actual living. You know, not working (usually) and doing activities that don’t involve the job or boring life requirements, like washing the dishes.

Sunday night has become the show and tell time from the weekend’s events on Facebook. Uploading that picture of you dancing on the bar from Friday night, or your story about how some lady backed up into your new SUV in the mall parking lot on Saturday afternoon then tried to pick a fight with you.

So what about those individuals who only access Facebook at work? They are probably updating their friends about their weekends escapades on Monday, on their lunch hour of course. Mondays have always been the primary traffic day online so that’s typical, but again Sunday is usually the worst. So let’s capitalize on this potential Facebook “Prime Time” schedule.

“Prime Time” Facebook advertising

Start experimenting with a weekend only version of a Facebook ad with a higher than normal bid on it, so that you can guarantee good placement for the weekend traffic spike. Activate that weekend only ad Friday afternoon before you leave for the weekend (remember to turn off the lower bid ad for comparison). Remember to update your Facebook status when it’s TGISNFBT time. You know you want to keep using that acronym.

Monday morning check the weekend ad’s CTR and see if you noticed a spike. Remember to turn off the higher priced weekend ad on Monday afternoon. Review the numbers throughout the week and determine if there was an identifiable increase for the weekend version of the ad. As with any online advertising campaign, if you don’t see an increase in traffic or conversions, revise it or kill it. Good luck!

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.

If you haven’t considered advertising on Facebook, you really should add it to your bag of tricks as soon as possible.

According to Michael Agger in a recent slate.com article, 150 million members are on Facebook now.

150 million people.

Consider this, I’m sure most of you know that Google adwords allows you to focus in on keywords and location. Critical elements to targeting your ads to exactly who you’re marketing to.

Google cannot (currently) tell you anything about the person searching on a paticular keyword. This is typically why your ads on Google fail for generic terms, there is no context for the search term.

For example, say that we want to advertise on the key phrase “web development” with Google Adwords. I want to show my ad to people looking for web development services, not those looking to learn about web development. I have no context of the users making hundreds of thousands of searches per month on Google for “web development”. Even though those out-of-context searchers won’t care about your ad and you don’t pay for the user who doesn’t click on your ad, Adwords lowers your ranking with every person that doesn’t click on your ad. Generic terms hurt your campaign. The lure of millions of searches is tempting, but the waste of ad dollars can be detrimental to your campaign’s overall ROI.

Facebook gives you the ability to target the users and keywords. Do you want to target 18-25 year olds? Perhaps you only want to target people who are engaged. How about this, you only want to target people who work at Kohl’s department stores.

Facebook advertising has the ability to focus your advertisement like a laserbeam directly to the type of people your trying to market to.

I will post the Facebook ad campaign results next week for a local small business. I’ll put together a small case study and share the results with you. Stay tuned!