Nov 11 2007
Facebook Social Ads – What a waste of time
What a waste of an afternoon!
I’ve heard a little bit about Facebook Flyers, and when I noticed one today on Facebook, I got to thinking that maybe it might be a good advertising opportunity for dLook. I clicked through to the flyer board to see what was on offer in Australia.
When I hit the link to create a flyer, I was prompted for my password. I thought that before I do that, I’ll read a little more about them. So I learned how big the image should be (110 x 220), how many characters were allowed (200) and the cost (from $5 for 2,500 impressions).
It all sounded good, so I set about making the ads – trying to keep in mind that Facebook users were the target audience.
Anyone who’s visited here enough will know that I don’t consider my self particularly creative or artistic, but I came up with two alternative images to add to the 200 characters of text for a trial run. I wanted to do something a little different, and since I’ve had a few comments about the emoticons I’ve been using here, I thought they might be “different” enough to catch a browser’s attention:
I spent some time putting some copy together – if you can call 200 characters “copy”, and signed in to create my campaign. I was then met with this message:
Note to Facebook #1 – A notice about this at the top of the Facebook Flyers FAQ might have been really handy and saved me a few hours work.
I figure all is not lost, however, and I follow the link to the new Facebook Ads. I think that perhaps the equivalent is Facebook Social Ads so I click through to learn more. I didn’t really learn much, but this sounded promising:
Get started right away and learn as you go.
Creating a Social Ad is quick and easy. Simply write a creative, tell us who you want seeing your ad, and decide where you want to drive traffic. You can buy ads by number of clicks (CPC) or by number of impressions (CPM). While the ad is running, you will receive performance metrics from Facebook Insights including demographic data of who’s engaging with your ad and feedback on how to optimize your ad.
Next I started the create Facebook Ad procedure. I have to select the audience I wish to target. Facebook informs me that there are 1,872,500 members in Australia – sounds great.
I experiment with the gender – Australia do we have a problem? Let’s see
567,460 males
820,020 females
1,387,480 total
Do we seriously have 455,020 people who are some mysterious gender?
Any how, moving on, I create my ad, only to find now the maximum is 135 characters, you can’t have more than two 1 letter words in succession, and you can’t have numbers and letters in the same word. It appears dlook.mobi is a combination of letters and numbers (but oddly dlook.com.au is perfectly fine).
Note to Facebook #2: a full stop is not a number.
Remember I learned from the flyers that the image should be 110 x 220? It doesn’t look very good here. So what size is optimal for the ad? I have no frigging clue, because I can’t find this information anywhere!
Note to Facebook #3: You need a more comprehensive advertising FAQ.
Note to Facebook #3: You need to make your FAQ Easier to find
I am not going to fiddle around with this ad anymore until I have specifics on what is the optimal size for the image. Sure, I could waste a few more hours redesigning banners to see what looks good – NOT.
Update: I finally found a link the the FAQs when I was checking out “Social Actions” – go figure. The optimal size for an image is 110 x 80.
Out of curiosity (and after putting a space between dlook and .mobi), I clicked through to “set budget”. Here I am presented with the option to set a budget according to impressions or clicks.
I’m not entirely sure how this works. I understand the concept – obviously this is an auction a bit like AdWords – but what is reasonable, what’s the best option…? So I click on the “more information” link. Where does it take me? Right back to the very process that I’m in (i.e. “create ad”). Grrr.
Update: It seems that I was trying to open this link in a new window – my bad (thanks Tim, for pointing it out). Still it doesn’t really tell me much:
Note to Facebook #4: If you are going to provide a “more information” link, then provide more information.
The final step is to provide my credit card details.
Note to Facebook #5: What is my commitment? How long am I signing up for? Can I stop tomorrow if I want?
This looks like an interesting service, but certainly frustrating.
Note to Facebook #6: Gimme a holler when you’ve smoothed out the wrinkles – then maybe we can talk.
7 Responses to “Facebook Social Ads – What a waste of time”
I admit the facebook ads is a little cumbersome at the moment. I believe that the keyword targetting feature has probably been the best advertising system I’ve ever used – but only because I have a keyword I can target.
“You are targetting people in Australia that like Surfing”
That is my target criteria for my site at http://apps.facebook.com/surfforecasts and its very effective.
It is fairly amazing that they have not got a FAQ for images sizes, I did find that a little strange, I just fumbled my way through it as you did but got a little further. Just to let you know, you can set a daily budget for a ‘campaign’ which can contain as many variations of your advertisement as you like and you can set a start and end date, you can also pause and delete your campaigns.
My surfing advertisements CPC was average 0.10 where another campaign I had which was targetted at 30-55 year olds in USA was 0.34. I noticed the CPC increase since the launch as I guess more people got on board.
Hi Gary
Thanks for the info about what you can do within a campaign. It’d be great to get that information from Facebook. Maybe I’ve missed a link or something, but I certainly looked hard.
So I’m assuming the system tells you what the minimum bid is? Or do you just set your budget and it works out what the bid is to activate your ads?
Would you believe I have never been to the facebook site, not once, ever at all? I have been anti it from the start, probably because of the hype. I don’t like hyped things.. 😉 but then I heard about the fat hate groups, and I was thrilled I’d never been there. I think they should take some responsibility. They’re kicking off breastfeeding photos but not the people making all the fat hate groups?
It does sound like a complete waste of time – I’m not sure what there is in Australia in the way of web advertising but surely there has to be something great out there and it doesn’t seem like this will be much of an addition to it.
Cheers,
Snoskred
The More information link, did you by any chance open it in a new tab or window, I did the first time and ended up at the start, they are using heavy javascript usage and the more information expands to show you the info.
Overall I have been more impressed with the social ads then with flyers I can target groups which is the main thing, still an expensive gimmick.
Hi Snos
I’m on there, but I don’t really do much with it.
It’s more a matter of looking for different advertising mediums (not relying too much on one source ie “Goog” for all the traffic). Having an Australian audience of 1.8m computer literate people who might be willing to try a new website is pretty attractive.
Tim
😳 Thanks, you are quite right – I have amended. Still the info isn’t particularly useful and I’m still no wiser about the image.
I thinking about advertising my business on facebook, but I’m really confused. 1) Should i pay per click or per 1000 page views? 2) how much should i pay – either per click of view? Same with Google ads, would appreciate some advice.
Nathan
Nathan
I’ve been using the system for the best part of a week, and should do a follow up. It’s a hard question to answer. My observations:
Page views mount up very quickly (can be tens of thousands per hour).
Try a couple of campaigns – one of each, and see how they go
Monitor it very closely
Don’t budget more than you can afford
Click through on cost per thousand is quite low – around .02% (for me).
This means if you bid say, 50c per 1,000 impressions you’d need 10,000 impression ($5) to get 2 clicks – which equates to around $2.50 per click.
If you’re looking for general branding CPM might be the way to go, but if it’s a specific action from your site then perhaps CPC might be better. But if you don’t bid much per click, then your ad won’t get much exposure! It’s hard to now.
Probably the strongest advice would be just to play around with different campaigns, but make sure you monitor it VERY closely.