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!