Poll: Does Facebook advertising work for you?
If yes, Can you give some tips/examples on what you did to make it work?
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.
It feels like this is very relevant especially since you think your next Adwords campaign will be more successful.
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.
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.
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?).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And why goog will kill them in the end :)
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 :-)
Of the people I've talked with, it seems that advertisements for alcoholic beverages and local food joints have the most success.
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.