Comments on: Advertising On Facebook

By: Ilkley

Ilkley — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:45:24 +0000

Hi billiant page I hope to see more about this soon…

By: Joe Scanlon

Joe Scanlon — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:44:34 +0000

Same here Philip – very much just testing the waters.
On a related matter, this blog is a fantastic source of help for start-up businesses. Well done with it, and thanks for continuously pumping out such valuable information.

By: Philip Boyle

Philip Boyle — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:43:13 +0000

We had 6 different ads running for 6 different clinic types on RevaHealth.com:

Dentists, Doctors, Plastic Surgery, Beauty, Hair Loss and Laser Eye, although only two of those accounted for over 8 million of the 9 million impressions so far!

We’ll change the ads if we decide to continue with using Facebook advertising in the medium to long term.

By: Philip Boyle

Philip Boyle — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:40:30 +0000

Our CTR rates ranged from the staggeringly low rate of 0.005% up to an equally unimpressive 0.045% across a selection of ads for different clinic types.

We’re not tracking any conversion data for these ads as it is mainly an experiment in minimum cost per click and what number of impressions we can get for as little money as possible.

In the long run, if we decide to explore it as a source of valuable traffic for our site we’ll put a lot of effort into managing our ad copy, the images and trying to optimise our CTR.

I’d agree about advertising online if your business is online, and I’m not sure about advertising on social networks either. Certainly, if I was going to try to drive some traffic through advertising, AdWords, Yahoo and Bing would be the first places I’d turn to.

By: Philip Boyle

Philip Boyle — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:29:49 +0000

The CPC in the screenshot is the suggested CPC from Facebook. We were paying around 25 cent initially and dropped this to 15 cent. At that point they stopped showing our ads, so we upped the bids to 18 cent and now we get some traffic most days, and very little on others.

We’re not looking to improve CTR rates for the ads we’re showing right now. The campaign is running more as an experiment about what is currently possible and what the minimum costs to run it would be.

Rest assured that we’d be testing copy and creative if it were a big results driven campaign. Right now it’s just a cheap way to get our name in front of a lot of people.

By: Leo Fogarty

Leo Fogarty — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:25:44 +0000

Considering there’s only 1m users of facebook in Ireland, I wonder what effect banner blindness had after 9m impressions. Did you change the ad at all?

By: Joe Scanlon

Joe Scanlon — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:07:59 +0000

Were you happy with CTR?
Mine were around 0.04%. Fair enough I was getting “my brand in front of as many people as possible” with well over 1 mill page views but I just don’t really rate that.
Conversions to newsletter signups were costing about 1Euro.
I’m in mixed minds about FB ads. People just don’t want to be interupted while “socialising” I feel. Also banner ads are really the blind spot at this stage and largely ignored.
I do however feel that if your business is online that your advertising needs to be online also.
My own site trys to focus more on the single ad every week and create a bit of a “buzz” but it would be a LONG time before I’d get to 9 million pages views!

By: Barry Hand

Barry Hand — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:05:38 +0000

It’s labelled as ‘social actions’ somewhere in the build process.

@ Philip Boyle
The CPC seems very high, I found it much better to lowball it at 0.1/0.2 and increase as needed until a fair balance is found.

Did you split test copy & creative at all?

By: Philip Boyle

Philip Boyle — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:02:07 +0000

Eagle eyes there Richard. Luckily it’s not a real ad, just one I typed up to get a screen shot for the blog post. Less haste, more speed next time!

By: Richard Hearne

Richard Hearne — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:23:10 +0000

Do I spot a nice typo in the ad copy?

“Get a quote and book and appointment today.”