Segmenting and Integrating Facebook Social Ads (that is, if you can get them to add your credit card and not delete your account!)
Those of you who have been following me on Twitter know that I am none too pleased with Facebook and their setup for social ads.
1) They keep deleting the account we are trying to use to place the ads because they don’t allow business accounts and want people to use their personal accounts instead (please raise your hand if you are willing to use your personal account to do business for your employer. No takers? Since most of us have our accounts private specifically to protect ourselves against the irrationality of over-zealous managers who think they own us outside of our jobs, I know I’m shocked…)
2) When I do manage to get an account up that they haven’t deleted yet, they refuse to add our procurement card to the account to pay for the ads, saying that we have entered the address incorrectly (when we haven’t) or some other lame excuse. Finally, we resorted to using someone’s personal credit card.
These frustrations aside (and believe me, I could go on and on and on about how a company run by a 23-year-old does not understand how to cater to business), Facebook Social Ads actually provide a pretty powerful tool for you to communicate with your audience. I previously wrote a blog about how do set one up. I think the true power of these ads, however, is in your ability to run multiple ads at the same time and track them in real time to see which ones are hitting with your audience and which ones aren’t. So in conjunction with our June Challenge marketing (which I wrote about in my last post), we decided to run a series of Facebook ads using. So once we finally got an account set up under a fake name and got someone’s personal credit card on the account to pay for them, we were ready to go. Here’s what we did:
A second important step in this process is making sure your ads are integrated with Google Analytics so that you can track who has made gifts on your website as the result of a visit from a click on one of these ads. You need to utilize GA’s URL builder to create your links.
Then when you log into your GA account, you can see how many visits have come from this link and if they had given any gifts:
And there you have it!
June 4th, 2008
Oh, how I wish I had a budget, haha. Maybe someday I can fight with Facebook over a business account!
I regularly get 0.03% clickthrough on Facebook. What is your CPC rate?
Also interesting to see the increase in views by generation!
June 4th, 2008
Hi Brad,
Facebook ads are pretty much the cheapest thing you can do so if you can’t get budget for this then you’ve got some convincing to do
Right now we are hovering at about .01% clickthrough rate. I wish I could give you stats from the last time I ran ads but Facebook deleted my last account and I lost all the data LOL.
In regards to the generational ads, I do not believe I’m at a point to really evaluate those yet (they’ve still been running less than 24 hours) but I also think that you can’t just look at the percentages on those, as clearly there are significant fewer members of Facebook who graduated in the 60s over the 90. Right now if you looked at the ads, the 1960s would show a 7% clickthrough, which is unreal, but doesn’t tell the real story.
Karlyn
June 5th, 2008
Awesome stuff! I agree w/ Brad though, sure would be cool to have a budget to play with that sort of stuff.
June 5th, 2008
Hi Kyle,
Thanks
Like I said to Brad, this is pretty much one of the cheapest things you can do. I don’t expect to pay more than $200 for this campaign, and I think that’s a high water mark. The beauty of this sort of thing is that although you don’t get a lot of leads, the ones you do get are very well qualified. When we did this for our last challenge, the people who got to our site through these ads gave at a much higher rate than our regular users. You guys go to more conferences a year that I do….stay at a cheaper hotel and take the extra - there’s your facebook ad budget
June 6th, 2008
Just wanted to correct the figure I gave Brad….we’re actually hovering at about .05% click rates on the Facebook ads….I’m not sure where .01% came from LOL
June 6th, 2008
$200 is still $200 out of my pocket. I paid about $50 for ads earlier in the fall/spring, but would rather buy gas for my car now, haha! Conferences come out of my pocket too. I’m probably sleeping on Kyle’s hotel room floor at eduWeb, don’t think I can get much worse than that
He said I might get a cot if I’m lucky.
I’m shooting for a budget in ‘09-’10, and posts like these will help my case even more. Surely we can cut something out of the 6 figure print budget to give me a measly $5,000? Once we have a director I will be able to actually make a case. It’s just a waiting game now…
I agree that the quality of your clicks is worth it because you can target and segment so well from their profiles. Facebook has some very valuable data.
June 6th, 2008
PS - update us on stats when the campaign is over.
June 6th, 2008
You don’t get reimbursed? That pretty much sucks. You should push funding for that or go someone else that will pay for your professional development. If they’re serious about their employees, they’ll do it (just ask Matt about how his review went
June 8th, 2008
We did a facebook ad campaign for an open house at Medaille College - though our clickthrough numbers were very low, the fact that we had over 10,000 impressions of our logo in front of prospective student eyeballs made me smile. And, at a cost of $1.53, you can’t beat the price.
June 8th, 2008
Hi Kara,
I think you bring up a good point - when we first started exploring these ads, my boss pointed out to me that this is not just about getting people to give. It’s also about awareness building, which is the case with most advertising. I think its important to always keep that in mind when evaluating results and you certainly can’t beat the price! You probably just got as many views as schools that buy billboards to enhance their brand and it costs relatively next to nothing!
June 10th, 2008
Hi Karlyn,
great info - we’ve had great success promoting our UC Davis Working Professional MBA program in SF Bay Area using highly targeted ads in LinkedIn. Over 1,200 clicks in two months, but it is pricey = $25K minimum.
June 10th, 2008
We wanted to use LinkedIn but avoided it because of the cost. Facebook is definitely a bit more affordable
Do you know if those clicks converted?
October 10th, 2008
Be careful of interpreting those click-through if you have a controversial ad. I know of at least a dozen people who regularly make ten click-throughs every time an ad that is offensive or disagreeable shows up — I’m assuming FaceBook’s ad rate is calculated on the CTs, and they are trying to cost them money.
October 10th, 2008
Hi Julie,
That’s why you use GA with the ad - so you can see what results came from the click.
January 9th, 2009
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