I just finished two different Facebook ad campaigns and I thought I’d share my thoughts on this interesting topic of how effective Facebook ads are. It is a fact that Facebook is a brilliant place to advertise, at least if you have a special target group with special interests located in a special place.
With Facebook you can let your special target group get the message you want to give them. This is worth a lot, so no wonder lots of companies use money advertising on Facebook. I have also done quite a lot of different Facebook ad campaigns the last years. One of my favorite ways of doing an ad campaign is as I launch a new Facebook site for a blog or some other project I have. Such a campaign can give your Facebook fan page a quick boost and might get you a group of faithful followers from the start.
Business and Faith page on Facebook
As I launched the Business and Faith blog I also made a Facebook ad campaign to get followers to the fan page on Facebook. I decided to spend 65 USD in total. Most of the money were spent on normal ads, and some money were spent on sponsored stories.
Facebook ads for the Business and Faith Facebook fan page
After running these ads for 14 days the final result gave us 980 new followers on Facebook! If we do some math that means 0,06 USD in general per new follower on Facebook. That is not a bad price at all. When advertising our Facebook page we used very general keywords such as SEO, blogging, business, faith and we wanted followers who spoke English living in English speaking countries all around the world. This means that we had an enormous audience for our ads, and that made the price nice for us. The smaller your target group is, the more expensive your ad will become, just see the following example..
Another example on Facebook ads
At the same time I worked with the launch of a Norwegian website and we launched a new Facebook site for this page. We used approximately the same keywords, but set the language of the users to be Norwegian (which limits the search a whole lot). I used 30 USD on the Facebook ad campaign, and for this amount of money the Facebook page got 35 new followers. That is not so far from 1 USD per new follower. As you can see the difference is incredible between the two ad types, and the reason is whether you have wide parameters concerning your target group, or if you have very specific requirements.
One thing that both campaigns had in common was that the sponsored stories turned out much more expensive compared to amount of new followers they gave. So after a while I stopped the sponsored stories for both Facebook pages, and just kept the normal Facebook page like campaign
Are Facebook ads effective?
So we got almost 1000 followers to our Business and Faith Facebook page using 65 USD. It is still worth asking the question if Facebook ads are effective? The statistics show that most of the people liking our page never even visited the page, they simply pressed like and continued scrolling their Facebook page. Are these people good followers? No! But, with time and if we do a good work creating good content and making the page attractive, then they might get a real interest for what our page is about later. And in a time when you have few visitors to the page, you can for sure now that as you post something to Facebook, at least a % of the fans you have will see it and give them the opportunity to read your content, see your picture and get involved. If you want to reach them all you have to promote the post which costs more money, but at least you have a basic audience which you can reach quite easily.
In our situation we have gotten some real dear followers through the our campaign on Facebook which are worth the investment themselves. Thank you Jane, Martin, Val, Bren, Khurram, Anabal, Michael, Krisztina, Eszter and all the rest of you.
Have you got any experience with Facebook ads? What are your thoughts on this subject?
2 Responses
I have not used the paid FB ads – just the place on my wall. Cant say that I have much success though.
That’s the challenge. Because if you just post something to you wall most people will not even notice it, much less visit your page, comment, like and share it. With more than 1000 followers on Facebook only 30-40 people see something as we post it to the Business and Faith wall. If we promote it that number can be multiplied with 20. So promoting will make sure people actually see your post, but it can not guarantee anything else….