Teething Problems

Now, as I have suggested on several previous occasions, Facebook social ads are still very much the ‘new kid on the block’, and therefore there are still a few initial teething problems to be dealt with.  Possibly the biggest problem that there is at the moment is that once your advert is created, it is impossible to go back and modify or to change it in any way.  If you need changes to be made, you must go right back to the beginning and recreate the ad from scratch once again.

If, therefore, you are going to use the Facebook ‘Social Ads’ PPC program, you should make sure that you keep a copy of your advert on your desktop or laptop computer, so that if you do need to make minor modifications or alterations, you can do so with relative ease.  This situation also applies should you wish to make changes, for example, to the targeting of your advertising as well. As it stands at the moment, therefore, the simple answer is to try and get it right from the start!

How Successful So Far?

Of course, it is still far too early to make any meaningful, constructive judgment of how successful Facebook are likely to be with their ‘Social Ads’ initiative.  Nevertheless, the standard by which all such PPC models are inevitably judged, Google AdWords, was extremely successful and worked well straight out of the box.  That fact has unfortunately set the bar over which all competitors are forced to leap very high indeed.

So, the first thing that should be mentioned about ‘Social Ads’ is that the fact that you cannot go back and modify your ads once they are created is annoying at the very least!  Secondly, whilst the objective of giving people so many demographic variables may be laudable, results so far indicate that it may to at least some extent be a touch counter-productive.

For example, we already know that every time you alter any variable, it alters the number of potential customers that the system shows you.  So, what seems to be happening so far is that some people are getting shown huge potential numbers of people who might be interested in their site, but are then seeing very few ‘clickthroughs’. Indeed, some people have actually seen no results at all, despite the apparently massive number of potential customers that Facebook indicates there are.

For the vast majority of people that have tried the system so far, the results have been somewhat disappointing.  A few examples from people that I know who are testing the system would suggest that there are still some problems that need addressing. 

For example, one of the testers that I know had a potential viewer group (i.e. the number that is shown at the top right hand corner of the screen when you go to the ‘Choose Audience’ screen) of some 10,000 and enjoyed a ‘click through’ of 165 viewers.  This is certainly less than what a well placed advert with AdWords or any of the leading competitors would be expected to generate.

Balanced against that, however, is the fact that all advertising costs are primarily driven by competition, and with Facebook still being relatively unknown territory, the costs are still considerably lower than those that Google would be charging for ads that would generate similar results.  And, of course, the effectiveness (or otherwise) of all advertising is entirely predicated upon how well or how badly the advert itself was put together.

For example, statistics have indicated time and again that ads with photos are likely to do better than those without, because pictures inevitably draw the viewer’s eyes way better than text alone can ever do.  There is even a marked difference between ads that have ‘good’ pictures, those that really appeal to viewers, and those that do not.  For proof of this, take a quick look at a site like eBay and see how many auction listings are promoted with a photo of a scantily clad lady attached, even though the picture is usually completely unrelated to the product being advertised.

While I have no way of knowing how well any of the ads whose results I am discussing here were written, I am assuming that all of them were of a similar quality.  Under such circumstances, I would suggest that 165 clickthroughs from 10000 at a reasonable cost is probably a satisfactory result, certainly not good but not too poor either.

Another example from the same marketing group, however, paints a very different picture - one that points to there being some serious system problems.  In this case, the initial potential ‘Audience’ was indicated to be over 1 million potential viewers for an advert.  Yet, a week later, there had not even been any impressions, never mind clickthroughs! In other words, the ad had not even been served to one single viewer, and so (somewhat obviously) no-one had clicked the ad!  This would suggest that there was something wrong with the system somewhere, clearly some ‘bug’ that needs ironing out and quickly as well.

The third example that I should mention is a very interesting idea for monetising Social Ads, an idea that should, in fact, work reasonably well with any reasonable or low cost PPC resource (but, one with a sting in the tail!). 

One of the most popular methods of earning money on the internet is through what are known as affiliate programs.  This is a system where an advertiser allows people to sell their products in return for a share of the initial sales price that is paid out as a commission.

In the most common scenario, most online affiliates are trying to sell or promote digital products from a site that brings many thousands of such products together into one ‘shop window’ a site like Clickbank.com, for example.  There are, however, other sites that offer similar affiliate sales programs, but for real world tangible products like perfumes, medicines, PC’s and basically anything else that you can buy in your local mall.  Again, most of these sites offer a commission for every sale that is generated from your efforts.

Some service orientated companies, however, will offer a payment for each lead that is generated by you.  Products like insurance and credit cards, for example, often offer arrangements like this, sometimes paying as much as $20 per lead!

Two sites where such CPA programs might be found are Commission Junction and AzoogleAds.  So, if you can find an attractive ‘pay per lead’ offer that pays well, plus low cost advertising then you should have a winner every time, at least in theory!

This is exactly what my third example of someone using ‘Social Ads’ did. They found an attractive product with great payouts, and set up a ‘Social Ads’ campaign to drive visitors to the site.

The first day, they enjoyed thirteen visitors from the Facebook ads, and the second day, that number increased to 24.  So far, there were no sales, but, with increasing visitor numbers every day, that was surely only a matter of time.  But then, Facebook disapproved of the advert and it was pulled from the marketplace!  When the advertiser quite reasonably asked why this should be, he was told that it was because his ad was in breach of the Social Ads ‘Terms of Service’, but he was not told how exactly, or what he could do about it!

Then Facebook also decided that they were not going to allow people to use certain search key words as well, such as ‘weight loss’, ‘dating’ and ‘scholarships’.  These are very basic, seemingly non-contentious ‘meat-and-drink’ keywords for internet marketers, the banning or removal of which makes no clear sense at all.  But, again, using these words is apparently in breach of the ‘Terms of Service’.

So are Social Ads worth using?  Find out in our next post on Facebook Marketing.