I had a first had a first-hand experience of using Facebook ads last week when I ran my first campaign on the social media.
First the positives: you can really narrow down your target audience. I’ve been in advertising for over 20 year and this type of specific targeting is truly impressive, which makes you go, ‘Whoa! Really? I can talk to people who are between 21 and 28 years, single, living away from family, working in xxx company?’
Secondly, you can set the budget.
Thirdly, you can track your visitor statistics as Facebook provides its own analytics which by the way could be at variance with Google Analytics. The difference in my case was huge, but I wasn’t the only one with this issue at the tip of my trackpad. It seems the different sets of algorithms and measuring metrics are the reasons given in internet forums as possible causes of such significant differences in reach. I have Google Analytics, Flag Counter, Stat counter and Weebly’s own stat tracker, and the numbers are considerably different even among these four traffic measuring widgets. On spending some time looking it up, I learnt that with StatCounter you have to paste the code on every page, otherwise it tracks visitors who come to whichever page you have the StatCounter on.
Going back to the positives of fb ads, you can periodically change your sales pitch, or test out different versions of the same ad and see which one works best. And you can state your bid for a particular campaign which is recommended instead of choosing the auto selecting option. Of course you can stop or suspend your campaign anytime you feel like.
I ran an ad promoting a short stories collection I was selling from my site and although it did receive huge traffic for the money I was spending, there were no conversions. But I was able to reach nearly 455,000 people for $5 a day over 7 days in the US, UK, India, Singapore and Australia. Here’s the breakdown: potential reach of 75980, frequency at 6.0, 290 clicks, and click through rate of .064 for a total of $39.53. To get the total impressions, you multiply reach by frequency, so that’s 455,880. Not bad for a $40 budget. At least I knew people were seeing my ads and clicking them. Facebook has a conversion which I haven’t used yet but you could give it a try.
I stopped my ads after a week as I wanted to rethink my strategy, my audience and the country profile. I am also thinking of employing Google Adwords in the mix to see where it leads me but maybe I’ll do another short burst of Facebook ads with a more specific target segment.
Meanwhile, it’s not a bad idea to spend a few dollars on facebook ads to drive traffic to your site.
First the positives: you can really narrow down your target audience. I’ve been in advertising for over 20 year and this type of specific targeting is truly impressive, which makes you go, ‘Whoa! Really? I can talk to people who are between 21 and 28 years, single, living away from family, working in xxx company?’
Secondly, you can set the budget.
Thirdly, you can track your visitor statistics as Facebook provides its own analytics which by the way could be at variance with Google Analytics. The difference in my case was huge, but I wasn’t the only one with this issue at the tip of my trackpad. It seems the different sets of algorithms and measuring metrics are the reasons given in internet forums as possible causes of such significant differences in reach. I have Google Analytics, Flag Counter, Stat counter and Weebly’s own stat tracker, and the numbers are considerably different even among these four traffic measuring widgets. On spending some time looking it up, I learnt that with StatCounter you have to paste the code on every page, otherwise it tracks visitors who come to whichever page you have the StatCounter on.
Going back to the positives of fb ads, you can periodically change your sales pitch, or test out different versions of the same ad and see which one works best. And you can state your bid for a particular campaign which is recommended instead of choosing the auto selecting option. Of course you can stop or suspend your campaign anytime you feel like.
I ran an ad promoting a short stories collection I was selling from my site and although it did receive huge traffic for the money I was spending, there were no conversions. But I was able to reach nearly 455,000 people for $5 a day over 7 days in the US, UK, India, Singapore and Australia. Here’s the breakdown: potential reach of 75980, frequency at 6.0, 290 clicks, and click through rate of .064 for a total of $39.53. To get the total impressions, you multiply reach by frequency, so that’s 455,880. Not bad for a $40 budget. At least I knew people were seeing my ads and clicking them. Facebook has a conversion which I haven’t used yet but you could give it a try.
I stopped my ads after a week as I wanted to rethink my strategy, my audience and the country profile. I am also thinking of employing Google Adwords in the mix to see where it leads me but maybe I’ll do another short burst of Facebook ads with a more specific target segment.
Meanwhile, it’s not a bad idea to spend a few dollars on facebook ads to drive traffic to your site.
RSS Feed
