Paid Facebook Ads - anyone using them?

[dgaddis]

(MODS - feel free to move this to the most appropriate forum...I assumed OT was the best place)

Anyone here have experience with using paid ads on Facebook? I have my first one running right now. Quick primer on how FB works for those that don't know.

Things posted by a company/organization/whatever on their Page isn't seen by all of their followers. FB's goal is to provide content their users (people, not businesses) like, that way they keep using FB. So, when a Page posts something, it's only shown to a small percentage of the people who follow the page. Then, depending on how well received the post is (how high the engagement is), FB will show it to more people.

Reach = how many people saw the post.

Engagement = how many people interacted with the post (clicking the link, like, share, or comment)

So, if a company post something that gets a lot of likes/shares/comments it gets shown to more people. If it doesn't get much engagement, it isn't shown. And when I say "shown" I mean put in their news feed - or their friends news feed (like when you see things like "your friend John Doe liked this post"). I believe likes/shares/comments are all given different value (a comment or share is probably worth more than a like), but FB doesn't really reveal exactly how their algorithm works, and I imagine it evolves every so often.

Quick note - if you want to help your friends business/page, like everything they post. That will extend their reach.

If you do a paid ad, you can extend that reach (it'll show up in the news feed of people who don't necessarily like your page), and you can target certain demographics. Gender, age, geography, and interests. You select how much you want to spend, and how long you want the ad to run. You must spend a minimum of $1/day. FB will give you range of predicted reach based on the $'s spent and length of time.

I have my first ad running right now, a post linking to an article on my page about Onyx hubs. I spent $10 and it's running for a week. I limited it to 22-60yr old users, both male and female, and for interests I put everything cycling/MTBing related I could think of.

The ad has been running for ~3.5 days now, so it's about half way done. Southern Wheelworks has a little over 400 likes, and most posts have a reach of 200-250 people, and gets 5-15 likes (typically). The ad has so far reached 1,364 people, and received 45 likes, and I've picked up an extra 10 or so followers.

SO, I'm pretty happy with it at this point. It hasn't necessarily translated into more sales (yet), but it has made more people aware of me, and it was cheap. I'll likely run another one at some point.

Anyone else used the paid ads?

[mmoore]

Ive noticed one of my friends that runs a new business of animal control has been using it. They seem to work pretty well to be honest in terms of getting the word out. not sure if its effective for drumming up business, but I would assume that it does a good job, being that you can tailor it to the market you want- in his case would be within the area he works in.

I will send him a message and see what his thoughts are.

M

[Will Neide]

*Liked

[Matthew Strongin]

I haven't used it first hand, but my wife has for the retail business she runs. The number of followers increased significantly, but the vast majority of them were people outside their target demographic and standard customer base. She hasn't seen a notable increase in sales or foot traffic as a result, either. Since her business isn't online, that likely limits the effectiveness of the expanded reach, so take it for what it's worth. It's also not a terribly expensive way to try to get some more visibility.

One benefit of Facebook (not the paid ads) that she has seen is staying in the forefront of her customer's minds and using it as another channel to keep them up to date on new products or events.

[rmplum]

Some guy with a crazy looking japanese name (suck on it google!) just "liked" your page. Good luck!

[steve garro]

Just cross-post your beta to & from your personal page.

- Garro.

[rec head]

*Liked

+1 Like

[stnphoto]

I have used them myself. Be a little wary of the new followers you get. Click in on the names and look at the profiles. Whenever I run one, a good number of those new followers certainly seem to be bots--lots of unusual names, no pictures or posts on their profiles, etc. YMMV, but I'm just glad the fees are as low as they are, because the positive results you may see on your ads manager may be worth about as much.

[dgaddis]

I have used them myself. Be a little wary of the new followers you get. Click in on the names and look at the profiles. Whenever I run one, a good number of those new followers certainly seem to be bots--lots of unusual names, no pictures or posts on their profiles, etc. YMMV, but I'm just glad the fees are as low as they are, because the positive results you may see on your ads manager may be worth about as much.

Yeah there's really no way to know for sure if the 'reach' # is true or not, you just trust that it is.

But all the reach, likes, shares, comments, etc aren't worth jack if they don't translate to sales. I can't pay my mortgage with Likes.

[alexstar]

I have no experience with paid ads on FB but I too have always wondered if they are worthwhile.

Here's one guy's experience:

[Matthew Strongin]

I have no experience with paid ads on FB but I too have always wondered if they are worthwhile.

Here's one guy's experience:

Thanks for posting that. I just showed it to my wife and she said it aligned very closely with what she found from using the Facebook promotions.

[dgaddis]

I have no experience with paid ads on FB but I too have always wondered if they are worthwhile.

Here's one guy's experience:

Very interesting indeed, thanks for sharing.

I haven't seen that sort of response yet. I've picked up 17 likes, not several thousand. I don't have time (or desire) to go look at the profile of each person, but most of their profile pics include bikes, and some of the people I've actually met before at races and stuff. So I think they're all real people.

The ad I did wasn't a 'promote your page' ad, I sponsored a normal post.

It is annoying to see my sponsored post in my own news feed. I'm paying to show myself the ad...

[dgaddis]

The ad has ran it's course and is no longer a sponsored post. Finally tally (as of right now):

Reach - 2757
Post likes - 80
Comments - 10
New page likes - 23

I did have one person contact me about possibly building them a set of the hubs featured in that post, but he heard about me elsewhere, not via the ad.

According to Google Analytics, no noticeable bump in overall traffic to the site, but that post does have higher traffic than others.

So, verdict so far: seems increases awareness of the brand, but no indication it brought in any sales.

Worth the $10 I spent? I dunno. But hey, it was only $10. I'll probably do it again at some point.

FWIW, this is the post:

[zank]

I have been running them. I've picked up a ton of new likers, and most of the profiles show people on bikes. I think the post I ran with Sean E's bike had a reach of about 17,000, a few hundred likes, and a bunch of comments. I spent $40. I'm going to continue to experiment with it.

[vertical_doug]

12:18 pm ET
Sep 18, 2015
Advertising
Facebook Is Putting More of Your Data Into Its Ad-Relevancy Machine



By Brian R. Fitzgerald
CONNECT

Associated Press

Facebook Inc.FB -0.28% will begin tailoring the ads you see based on your use of the “like” button and similar features on millions of Web pages.

It’s the latest in Facebook’s effort to deliver ads it says are relevant to your interests. Those ads are based on your profile, the Pages within Facebook that you like, your Web-surfing habits and the apps that you use.

You’d be forgiven for believing Facebook already was using data from other websites’ “like” buttons. It’s been collecting this data for years.

Facebook tucked the announcement into a post Tuesday about giving you more control over ads you see. (The headline: “A new way to control the ads you see on Facebook.”) You have to scroll down to the bottom of the short post to learn about the new effort. Facebook said it signaled the change last year.

Facebook already gets data about the website a user visits and when the user visits them. The new data is for “likes” and “similar social features,” including its “share” and “send” features. (There’s a dossier of social plug-ins here.)

These tools can raise privacy hackles, and Facebook has been dinged repeatedly over how it uses your data. (Your “likes” say a lot about you, such as political and religious views, data show.) The social network gives you levers to pull to control or opt out of some of that data gathering.

Here are ways to review and change the ad preferences set up about you. Hint: You have to drill into the category tree to be able to delete categories of ads shown to you. (Here’s looking at you, Sharks and Syracuse University.) You can totally opt out here from seeing ads based on your interests. But Facebook will still collect the data.

[mmoore]

same with how you can use facebook to log into forums/apps/etc. I use it for that a lot, its convenient and they aren't things that really matter. i.e. not using it for things like banking, but I use it for strava, forums, etc.

[fiveller]

Great article about click farms and the issues the youtube video above talks about:

The Bot Bubble: Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency | The New Republic

[dgaddis]

12:18 pm ET
Sep 18, 2015
Advertising
Facebook Is Putting More of Your Data Into Its Ad-Relevancy Machine
.....

Anyone who thinks Facebook isn't 100% about data gathering and advertising, is silly naive.

Do people really think a company would speed all the time and effort and money building something like Facebook just so people can share pictures of their cats with each other for free?

[EricKeller]

Anyone who thinks Facebook isn't 100% about data gathering and advertising, is silly naive.

Do people really think a company would speed all the time and effort and money building something like Facebook just so people can share pictures of their cats with each other for free?

of course, at first it was just a way to sell stock. Now that that scam has worked out, they need to monetize the product. I think they will do just about anything for money. There is an old adage on the internet, if you can't tell what the product is, you are the product.

[vertical_doug]

Long form read on bloomberg. How fake traffic is rotting the internet.

The Fake Traffic Schemes That Are Rotting the Internet - Bloomberg Business

Marketers thought the Web would allow perfectly targeted ads.
Hasn’t worked out that way.

By Ben Elgin, Michael Riley, David Kocieniewski, and Joshua Brustein
Ron Amram has been in the brand marketing business for about 20 years. In the 2000s he was media director for Sprint’s prepaid cellular group, mainly figuring out where the carrier should spend its ad dollars—print, outdoor, digital, or broadcast. TV was always at the top of the pyramid. A TV campaign was like “the Air Force,” Amram says. “You wanted to get your message out, you did carpet bombing.” But TV wasn’t cheap, nor did it solve “that age-old question: Half of my marketing is working, half of it is not, and I don’t know which half.”

About 10 years ago, not long after Google went public and Yahoo! was still worth upward of $50 billion, attitudes shifted. Digital search and display ads had the potential to reach TV-size audiences at a fraction of the price. “People thought it was going to change everything,” Amram says.

The euphoria escalated again around 2010 with the arrival of programmatic advertising, a typically banal industry term for what is, essentially, automation. The ideal programmatic transaction works like this: A user clicks on a website and suddenly her Internet address and browsing history are packaged and whisked off to an auction site, where software, on behalf of advertisers, scrutinizes her profile (or an anonymized version of it) and determines whether to bid to place an ad next to that article. Ford Motor could pay to put its ads on websites for car buffs, or, with the help of cookies, track car buffs wherever they may be online. Ford might want to target males age 25-40 for pickup-truck ads, or, better yet, anybody in that age group who’s even read about pickups in the past six months....