Ask HN: Facebook Advertising Platform

2 points·jyothi··2 comments

I had a client approach me to advertise on facebook. A year ago when I used them they were not as effective compared to Adwords and other options. But offlate I do see better ads and well placed, so was wondering if anyone can educate me on the status.

Please share any learnings/ opinion about your marketing campaigns and effectiveness on facebook?

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I had mixed results with a small sample of about 100 paid clicks.

Compared to AdSense, Facebook had 2X the percentage of users who signed up for a free account. However, it had only half as many goal conversions, where the goal was simply using a free application. Kind of weird. I probably need to buy some more ads and rerun the campaigns before I make any conclusive judgments though. Costs were similar between the two.

If I do PPC in the future, I'll probably do about 30% Facebook, 70% Adsense unless the conversion rates change dramatically.

The upside is that you _sometimes_ get leads. The downside is that ads are overly-expensive for what you're getting. In my opinion, it's better to create a viral campaign and let others do the marketing for you ;).

Edit: thoughts from Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint: "All of our customer acquisition has been free -- through social media, blogs, and the press." (http://www.inc.com/ss/aaron-patzer-made-170-million#5)

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