Next Digital Marketing Test: Facebook Ads

Last week I wrote about Google AdWords after we started an ad campaign and began tracking the results. I took it upon myself to also start an ad campaign on Facebook, since I had heard that it’s easy to use and produces great results. As with Google, I used my own website Supraterranean.com for the test. After trying Facebook ads myself, I think it’s safe to say that those claims are correct. In just over a week’s time, my ad got 85,000 impressions and 25 clicks. You can specify your daily budget and CPC bid. I set both of mine pretty low, so I’ve only spent $4.55 so far. I was able to design the ad myself (preferably a 4×3 image) and target people by age, geography, and keyword.

After the ad goes live, Facebook provides easy-to-use diagnostic tools so I can evaluate ad performance. Their graphs are clear and attractive. Facebook also gives you the option for the ad to appear with social actions from certain groups or pages. I set my ad to appear with social actions from the Supraterranean.com group.

Now it’s necessary to compare with Google Adwords. My ad there was created about two weeks ago. In that time, it’s had 75,000 impressions and 13 clicks. That means that Adwords is performing at about half the productivity of Facebook ads! Granted, the success of Google Adwords might have more to do with how well I’ve completed search engine optimization for my site. Those 13 Adwords clicks have cost me $3.33, which means I’m also getting more of my money’s worth on Facebook. I plan to use both Adwords and Facebook for future digital marketing efforts. But as of now, more of my energy will go into Facebook.

More To Google Than Meets The Eye

Our work in the Ingenex internship keeps getting more interesting. Previously we learned how to choose the most appropriate keywords when optimizing a website for search engines. Google’s Keyword Tool and SEO Book helped us with this. Now we’re learning what to do with those keywords.

I used my own website Supraterranean.com as a test to implement the chosen keywords in automatically generated advertisements using Google AdWords. I typed in the dozen or so keywords, set the monthy budget and maximum per-click bid, and started the ad campaign. The results have been interesting, to say the least. In one week, my advertisement has had almost 40,000 impressions (i.e. – views). Only about 6,000 of those were on Google search results. The other 34,000 were on Google’s content network, the websites that have installed Google’s ad service to try and make money on a pay-per-click basis.

We weren’t sure if the content network would produce results, but out of the 8 clicks that linked to my website, 7 of them occurred on the content network. Only one click came from a sponsored link in search results. By the way, those 8 clicks have cost me about $1.86 so far, which I think is pretty reasonable.

I know that these findings are influenced by my extremely low budget, and that more of my ads would show up in search results if I paid more. However, these initial results are truly exciting, even just that I can expose my ad to 40,000 viewers in a week with such an efficient system. It’s great to learn about all the amazing services that Google is providing. They are a lot more complex than just a search engine, or even a search engine and worldwide map service. I’m sure I’ll be using their other services soon.