Facebook advertising experience
6 October 2010
After looking into advertising on facebook for a project for K-State’s CEO I discovered I had $50 free advertising credits from when I signed up for my hosting account with GoDaddy and another $50 that came as a advertisement in Entrepreneur Magazine from October 2010. Instead of reading other’s speculations and results I decided to sign up and promote The Fourum (one of my more popular pages that has encountered stagnant user growth over the last few months) and I encourage you to do the same. A little background: The Fourum is a website that allows Kansas State University students to submit anonymous, random thoughts. We pick the best ones and they are posted to the website and the facebook page. Jared Krause and myself built the site after our school newspaper removed it from the paper and readers revolted. At the time of writing our facebook page has 1,570 users that “like” it.
I redeemed both codes after I setup my credit card (which is required) and claimed my $100 in free advertising credit. This was a fairly simple process and I won’t go into details here. I created an ad (on the right) off the top of my head as an experiment at around 8:00pm central time. The ad didn’t get approved until morning and by the afternoon I had around 3,000 impressions, which is the number of times the ad appeared on facebook. This did not cost me anything because I chose to pay per click. I set my max bid at 65 cents. I set my lifetime budget to $10 and for the campaign to run for just 6 days.
I’ve done some research in the pay-per-click advertising arena before and I knew the ad should have gotten one or two clicks if it was good so I decided to create another ad with different copy. Since the website and facebook page are targeted at Kansas State University students ages 18-24, I began to think about what this group had in common. I came to the conclusion that they all love to hate the University of Kansas. So I use facebook’s “Create A Similar Ad” feature to copy everything about the original ad to a new one. The only thing I changed was the copy. The finished ad is on the left.
I started this ad around 3:00pm. I checked the statistics and hour later and it had already had a few thousand impressions and one or two clicks, a noticeable improvement. I’m not sure if the large number of impressions at such a high rate was caused by higher user traffic on facebook or because the ad was getting clicked on. I am leaning towards the latter. To keep the ads showing up I had to adjust the lifetime budget because it appears that facebook divides the budget across some subdivision (ex: days/hours) of the time frame equally and I wanted to keep experimenting. I also reduce the time frame from 6 days to 4 days which allowed the ad to keep being displayed. The click through rate (CTR) on the ad kept climbing and is now at 13 clicks or .11% CTR. I believe this is a decent CTR.
A few notes on this ad:
- As clicks and CTR increased the average cost-per-click (CPC) decreased, I believe this is meant to help drive advertisers to submit better ads.
- The higher the social % (the percent of impression that show one of a user’s friends ‘liking’ the page) the more likely a user is to click on the ad.
- The ad translated into roughly 75% of clicks turning into new users ‘liking’ the page.
- Facebook only accepts/declines ads during the day, so if you submit one at night it won’t be approved till morning. (At least in the U.S.)
I changed the first ads copy once I realized it wasn’t effective. Because K-State is playing the University of Nebraska this week in football, our motto this week is “Keep the Red Out.” I wanted to incorporate this into the ad because of the excitement on campus around the football game. The ad I built is on the right.
This ad seems like it was too complex because by the time it had a few thousand impressions it didn’t receive any clicks. I have since rewritten it and the new copy is pending review. I am also starting to play with changing the target audience and see how it effects the conversion from a click through to a user actually “liking” the page.
I’ll keep you updated on anything else I learn.
Note: Ironically as I was writing this post facebook went down.
You can visit The Fourum at www.thefourum.com, on facebook, or on twitter (@fourum).
Update 1: My last ad (to the left) is performing okay. Not as well as my 2nd (KU bashing) but it is getting a decent CTR. I messed around with facebook ads’ reporting abilities and found out a statistic called “actions,” I believe this is reported when someone “Likes” your page. Right now my actions/click ratio is 3/26, so my conversion ratio is not as high as I thought. I think facebook’s built in social features for telling your friends when you like a page and this mechanism driving the extra “likes” I am seeing.
Changing the age range hasn’t really seemed to make a big difference on the ads effectiveness. I am going to launch a new ad that points to www.thefourum.com instead of our facebook page, but is targeting users that like websites simliar to The Fourum (Texts From Last Night, My Drunk Texts, Fail Blog, Post Secret, etc). Estimated reach of only ~3000 people.
**Update 2: **I have come to the conclusion of my first facebook advertising campaign, lasting 5 days. Below are the stats of my best three ads:
Ad #2 (KU bashing):
- 112,903 Impressions
- 92.3% Social
- 91 Clicks (.081% CTR)
- .29 Avg Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
- .24 Avg Cost-Per-Thousand-Impressions (CPM)
- 26.61 Spent
- 14 Action
Ad #4 (Keep the Red Out):
- 17,439 Impressions
- 84.4% Social
- 5 Clicks (.029% CTR)
- .53 Avg CPC
- .15 Avg CPM
- 2.63 Spent
- 1 Action
Ad #5 (KU Bashing, Linking to the www.thefourum.com and not the facebook page):
- 1,351 Impressions
- 0% Social (Because it was not a facebook page)
- 1 Click (.074% CTR)
- .76 Avg CPC
- .56 Avg CPM
- .76 Spent