I have run a few test campaigns on AdWords and Facebook recently.
I was expecting better traffic and conversions from my Google campaign. The exact opposite happened, and by a large margin.
I received a lot more traffic from Google in a shorter timeframe but converted that traffic to registered users somewhere in the 5% range - I wasn't really happy with that. I believe the root cause there was the words I was picking, it's really hard to pick the right search terms. I don't think I've got it right yet and I expect my next campaign to go better.
Facebook's process is much, much more intuitive for a marketer though. It's easy for me to identify what my specific target market "likes" and then advertise a compelling message to them. The frequency of traffic was lower than Google's but the quality of the traffic was much, much higher. I converted nearly 20% of the traffic which I was much happier with.
I prefer Facebook's targeting as I found it a lot easier and it worked well for me but I need to spend more time with AdWords to determine if Facebook is better for me (It ended up being cheaper, too), but it's been pretty good so far.
Facebook on both counts. Again, I was shocked. The CPC on Facebook started higher than it ended and the average ended up being lower than on AdWords (By about 10% or so IIRC). So Facebook ended up sending slightly more traffic over the course of the campaign and converted far more users - by large margin, >70% of the total.
So I'm sure my AdWords campaign could use some improvement as I don't think the difference should be so great, but it has been. And again, this is not what I was expecting. I was expecting the opposite.
It helped me reduce carbon emissions when setting money on fire for three different people now. (n.b. All were trying to get direct sales, which many people would say FB is contraindicated for.)
I work at a place that runs an ad network for facebook apps (so it is ads in Facebook, but not run by Facebook). It definitely works well in some particular areas, like in driving app installs or reengagement. For example, if you've got an app that has a high ARPU but low virality, then fb ads might be an attractive arbitrage opportunity.
Generally, I think the ads are good if you aren't seeking a commercial exchange right away, but rather are trying to build some type of relationship that can be capitalized later on.
Most of the time I have received poor results when measuring on a CPA basis, compared to conversion through other channels (cost per registration in my situation). I have had a few great successes of bringing CPA under $2 for a very targeted key words. For example a recent advertisement for a campaign we were running on the artist "Ray LaMontagne" worked superbly, probably because the keywords weren't extremely popular and we happened to be giving away VIP tickets to his show the same weekend. So it was very low friction.
As with any advertising channel, your mileage will greatly vary depending on what you're marketing, what you expect in return (branding, sales, site registrations?).
It can. It's not as good a DR channel as paid search, simply because you're buying demographics and interests rather than intent.
However, for list building and 'softer' DR actions like a whitepaper download or a lead form fill, it can work very well.
There's also a lot of off-the-wall targeting things you can do, like advertising your blogger program to mommy bloggers, targeting reporters at techcrunch and mashable with your app launch, and other things that fall outside of the scope of traditional display advertising.
I used this trick when I launched http://anynewbooks.com. I used existing credits (if I remember correctly) I had on both LinkedIn and Facebook to target publishers, book bloggers, and journalists. It worked, to a certain extent.
It worked very well for my startup in the restaurant reservations space. Our objective was brand awareness in a specific city and our target audience were journalists and social media influencers in general.
We also used it to target those who were already using competitor's services.
It is not set and forget, though. You have to tweak it constantly and, as other have said, it works better for "soft actions", like "likes" and email subscriptions.
You can't compare it to adwords, it's a different beast entirely.
Yes, it works for me. I advertise an advertising service for small businesses, and target very specifically to people that identify as a specific type of marketer. Each ad reaches only xx,xxx people at most. I've been running the ads since the beginning of summer as the ROI has been positive.
Kind of a funny example: During my last few semesters at college I operated a textbook buyback service and experimented with facebook advertising. The one ad I put up that got me a ton of likes and positive feedback was just a small picture of a bottle of this cheap brand of vodka that happened to be popular at this party school with the text "get money for the weekend" or something. It just linked to a page where I would put up a pictures of textbooks with a caption of how much I paid for it.
This could probably be profitable for anyone if you're at a big school with a decent amount of friends.
The trick with Facebook ads is create that magic combo of the right keywords, demographic profile and creative approach to making your ad stick out within the limitations of their format. It also depends on who you're going after: I ran one campaign for a content focused website and that did well -- did another campaign aimed at a professional audience and had mixed results at best (maybe my product was too specialized).
You also have to design your strategy to work with the ecosystem of facebook and play their "game". Their game is that they want you set up a page on their service and for you to feed it with content which they'll do you the favor of maybe getting through to your audience (and yes that content needs to be crafted just as much as an ad).
My suggestion is to look at other ads that appear on the system and then play with your creative and then measure your results.
It works incredibly well for my wife's necktie/bowtie biz (http://wickhamhousebrand.com) but has sucked any sort of nerdy thing (eBooks, apps, etc.) I've tried to promote. I'm guessing nerds don't take well to that sort of ad?
AdBlock in Chrome prevents ad images from being displayed, but they are still downloaded. This is different from FF where ads are blocked at the downloading stage. In other words the impression counter can easily go up without ads being actually seen.
For me, it has always resulted in a significantly lower CTR and conversion rate than AdWords–and that's even after accounting for the higher CPC at AdWords. So I gave it up. Also, the number of clicks I paid for was always higher than the number of visitors GA told me I was getting from FB–and that kinda ticked me off.
The only time I've seen it work is for some wedding photographers I've worked with–and this is mainly because you can show ads to "women who are engaged".
So, it can work for some service providers whose target market can be sliced out of FB's demographics. But for most software-type businesses, there's dozens of better ways to put marketing money to work.
We tried recently tried relatively identical campaigns (few grand into each) for AW and FB for http://premium.wpmudev.org - AW was by far far the winner... can't beat people actually looking for stuff, rather than annoying them while they're trying to socialize!
In my view, that's where FB falls over most of all, they're only fundamentally attractive to agencies looking for 'in your face' rather than 'purpose based' ads... pointless for a highly niche relatively small budget crew like us.
Early on in its history, I promoted JavaScript Weekly (an e-mail newsletter) on there aimed specifically at people with an interest in JavaScript. I seem to recall it converted at about 70-90¢ to the signup. At the time it was just a side project and made no sense but that's a pretty attractive price from today's perspective so I'm likely to try it again very soon.
I used a $50 coupon I had lying around to direct people to a landing page for a product targeted towards gamers. Being able to be super specific in the people I wanted to show the ad too was nice and in return for the $50 I got 89 people interested enough in the product to leave their email addresses. I still don't know if this qualifies as successful or not.
a little more than 50 cents for leaving you the email, with some form of agreement that let you send informative messages on your product to these emails, is in my opinion a successful result.
Depends what you're selling. If your gross profit per sale, before marketing expenses, is 50c then it's not super-effective (unless you're selling the same person lots of items).
You can tell Google AdWords is designed by a committee of engineers. It's amazingly complex. I challenge you to make sense of the scoring that supposedly explains why your ads are showing or not. I don't think your average user has any clue why or how their campaigns work or don't work.
In my opinion, AdWords is ready for disruption, and Google will not know what hit them until it's too late. They are the legacy system now. It feels like using an IBM 3270 terminal when all the cool kids moved on to the VT100 :-)
Unless you have enough capital to sustain Facebook ads for a long period, they're never going to work.
We'll see how the Facebook Timeline and the new F8 solutions react to advertisers and businesses. But, unless you're an event-centric business, you're not going to benefit tremendously on Facebook.
Instead, the best methods are to drive traffic towards mediums like Twitter, where you can have conversations with customers without appearing like you're "on show" in front of an audience. You're a customer for someone else, and you're savvy enough to read into social media advertisements with skepticism. You can't tell me that that's unique to just you.
Not true - it worked in our case (a facebook app) from day one. Click-through is low (around 0.05%) but convertion tend to be a lot higher than adwords...
This is directed towards advertisers, but as an end user, I can say yes, they work very well. Facebook and ads from the deck are the only ads I will willingly click on, ever. And I do click on them willingly. Sometimes I even browse through the ads listing on the deck, and "more ads" on Facebook. This is because almost all of them are quality products and relivent to me. I wish more ads were as good.
I've ran campaigns for all kinds of products on facebook, and none had a good roi. From what I understand the only real way to make cash from Facebook is to do CPA type things(i.e. enter your email address to win a free iPad)
I'm spending about $500/day and making $300-$1000/day profit running affiliate offers. I'm using Facebook ads to bootstrap my development. I vote "Yes", it works, unless you are bad at it.
I was expecting better traffic and conversions from my Google campaign. The exact opposite happened, and by a large margin.
I received a lot more traffic from Google in a shorter timeframe but converted that traffic to registered users somewhere in the 5% range - I wasn't really happy with that. I believe the root cause there was the words I was picking, it's really hard to pick the right search terms. I don't think I've got it right yet and I expect my next campaign to go better.
Facebook's process is much, much more intuitive for a marketer though. It's easy for me to identify what my specific target market "likes" and then advertise a compelling message to them. The frequency of traffic was lower than Google's but the quality of the traffic was much, much higher. I converted nearly 20% of the traffic which I was much happier with.
I prefer Facebook's targeting as I found it a lot easier and it worked well for me but I need to spend more time with AdWords to determine if Facebook is better for me (It ended up being cheaper, too), but it's been pretty good so far.