Google Adwords has dominated the online advertising space for the last three or four years but Facebook I believe is positioned to really challenge Google for some of those advertising dollars.
We recently ran a series of campaigns for local events on Facebook and I was really impressed with the ROI that we got. It was much higher than anything that we have gotten using Adwords. So how did we do it?
Demographic Targeting
Unlike Adwords, Facebook users are not actively searching for your product or service. But by using Facebook’s demographics and location data we were able to really focus on our target audience.
Since our campaign was specific to a location we were able to target just the people who liked the brand we were promoting and who lived within 50 miles of the event.
This ended up being a really small group, but that was ok because the conversion event and CPC was really good.
Use Pictures
We tested ads with pictures and ads without. The ads with pictures all performed substantially better than those without.
Test Multiple Ads
When we run a paid campaign we always use multiple ad text, but it really is useful on Facebook. We tested new ad content every day until we were sure we had the most optimized copy. Then we let that as run until the end of the campaign.
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It’s true, Facebook Ads are killer, whereas Adwords are just alright.
I ran a similar test comparing Adwords and Facebook Ads, what I found was that I could not only spend considerably less on Facebook Ads, but I also learned that people clicking through my ads on Facebook were MUCH more likely to purchase my product!
How likely were people coming from Facebook to purchase? Facebook Ads had a 100% conversion rate, whereas Adwords was stuck around 16%.
Great info! I wonder how the results would differ for something less local though.
This came as a bit of a surprise to me as I would expect that purchase intent is much higher on Google than on Facebook. Perhaps a little data, context, and other specifics would be useful. I would be really interested to find out what product/type of ad campaign this is and which demographic was being targeted.
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