Facebook SocialAds Hit A Few Bumps
Posted by Nick O'Neill on November 28th, 2007 8:30 AMA couple weeks ago, Facebook unleashed SocialAds on the world. Facebook also announced their new Pages service and listed a number of launch partners. Since then, small businesses have had the opportunity to test out the new system and launch partners have begun promoting their pages via ad campaigns. So how has it turned out in the first couple weeks? While it hasn’t been horrendous, I wouldn’t yet call Facbook’s new advertising system as revolutionary. In order to developer a revolutionary advertising platform, it must not only be innovative but also deliver results.
Facebook has played with various models for promoting these new pages including a brief 24 hour placement at the top of the newsfeed yesterday that announced the new Pages service to members. That announcement included links to the Dave Matthews Band page as well as the (RED) campaign page. While I don’t have data pertaining to the daily growth of these groups, the numbers are relatively average for any sort of marketing campaign.
The Dave Matthews Band has close to 56,000 fans and the (RED) campaign has approximately 37,000 fans. While these are by no means horrible results, as a percentage of click thrus from a one day ad at the top of the newsfeed, it’s not that impressive. For comparison, The Dave Matthews Band has a whopping 300,000 members on MySpace. Time will be the true test here but it appears that the start of ad campaigns on Facebook are extremely slow but viral growth helps amass users over time.
How about small businesses, how have they been performing? Not so well according to the people that have been emailing me over the past couple weeks. The most frequent message that I get from individuals is about how their seemingly normal advertisement doesn’t get approved. Additionally, they get absolutely no feedback from Facebook simply a rejection notice. I’m not quite sure about Facebook’s policy for advertisements but the ones that users have sent me don’t seem to violate any terms that I know of.
Finally, Facebook ads have been getting a horrendous click-thru rate for most users. If you have had a positive result with Facebook SocialAds then please let me know and I’d be happy to post about your experience. I don’t want to be overly critical of Facebook but their ad performance have been relatively sub-par for all of the small business owners that I have spoken to. Perhaps that’s because the small business owners that would gain the most from this advertising system have yet to register.
I believe that the biggest growth opportunity for Facebook is in external advertisements that leverage your Facebook cookie to deliver highly relevant advertisements. Additionally, Facebook could more agressively target specific verticals such as music, movies and television. The main problem there is that they will be duplicating AOL’s model and that’s the last thing Facebook wants to become. How do you think Facebook could improve their advertising system? Is their existing system enough?
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November 28th, 2007 at 10:06 am
[...] posts that Facebook’s new SocialAds service may not be that revolutionary. Click-through rates have been awful and many individuals and small businesses have had their ads [...]
November 28th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Nick - I have been experimenting with pages and ads since the day they were introduced to promote and start discussion on my company http://www.giftgirl.com. The results are mixed at best. 1st Issue: technology. FB seems to think I have 2 pages and when I try to edit the “phantom” page it takes me to my personal page. FB support acknowledged this as a bug. I think it may directly be leading to other issues. I started running ads on Nov 07 and got a fair number of clicks when all of a sudden they dropped to single digits on the 16th. No explanation of why, etc I upped the bid, nothing. I then upped it to a ridiculous amount to experiment. Nothing. What changed? ( i do realize I could have just been way ahead of the curve and been the only one running ads! 2nd issue: management: You can't modify your ads, you must create a new one. bad. Graphs are on a week by week basis in the table. Why not allow for a longer time period? On a final note: They do a horrible job at telling you how to go about using pages vs groups. Should you post items? Should you post notes? Is there a way to put things on your fans' news feeds (perhaps with an opt out option so companies don't end up spamming) I created a fictional fb member to test what gets posted by my company page so I didn't annoy my fans and actually could tell how my actions looked as I posted them and I gotta tell you it's not obvious the best way to provide value to your fan base. The last thing I want is for the page to end up like a group….something that users join for status then blow off. Good article, Thanks - Mike
November 28th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Nick - I have been experimenting with pages and ads since the day they were introduced to promote and start discussion on my company http://www.giftgirl.com. The results are mixed at best. 1st Issue: technology. FB seems to think I have 2 pages and when I try to edit the “phantom” page it takes me to my personal page. FB support acknowledged this as a bug. I think it may directly be leading to other issues. I started running ads on Nov 07 and got a fair number of clicks when all of a sudden they dropped to single digits on the 16th. No explanation of why, etc I upped the bid, nothing. I then upped it to a ridiculous amount to experiment. Nothing. What changed? ( i do realize I could have just been way ahead of the curve and been the only one running ads! 2nd issue: management: You can’t modify your ads, you must create a new one. bad. Graphs are on a week by week basis in the table. Why not allow for a longer time period? On a final note: They do a horrible job at telling you how to go about using pages vs groups. Should you post items? Should you post notes? Is there a way to put things on your fans’ news feeds (perhaps with an opt out option so companies don’t end up spamming) I created a fictional fb member to test what gets posted by my company page so I didn’t annoy my fans and actually could tell how my actions looked as I posted them and I gotta tell you it’s not obvious the best way to provide value to your fan base. The last thing I want is for the page to end up like a group….something that users join for status then blow off. Good article, Thanks - Mike
November 29th, 2007 at 12:48 am
I have actually been having some pretty good experiences with SocialAds, although I might be in a unique position. I've run a number of ads for different products, and the CTRs have varied dramatically. From what I've seen, it all comes down to how targetable is your ad. Ads for the Stitchbook app (http://apps.facebook.com/stitchbook) have had really solid clickthrough rates - today overall I'm at 1.36% and am not paying very high CPC. But ads for more general subjects (a site related to storytelling for example) had much lower CTRs. I agree with Michael that the system is still pretty bad… my biggest gripe is that I can't create an ad that targets multiple countries; I have to recreate the ad for each country. That's fine for the US, Canada, and UK, but I'm not even bothering with the smaller countries, simply because it's more work right now than it's worth. I get a sense that the whole system was rushed out, which, isn't so bad necessarily, it's just that there isn't good support, not even someone to read and answer forums. I suspect that's one of the reasons why Pages hasn't been heavily promoted… they put it out as beta (without calling it so), and are allowing time for the bugs to get worked out and to learn more about what people want. I don't think that's such a bad approach, but it doesn't seem like the support task is being taken seriously enough.
November 29th, 2007 at 1:48 am
I have actually been having some pretty good experiences with SocialAds, although I might be in a unique position. I’ve run a number of ads for different products, and the CTRs have varied dramatically. From what I’ve seen, it all comes down to how targetable is your ad. Ads for the Stitchbook app (http://apps.facebook.com/stitchbook) have had really solid clickthrough rates - today overall I’m at 1.36% and am not paying very high CPC. But ads for more general subjects (a site related to storytelling for example) had much lower CTRs. I agree with Michael that the system is still pretty bad… my biggest gripe is that I can’t create an ad that targets multiple countries; I have to recreate the ad for each country. That’s fine for the US, Canada, and UK, but I’m not even bothering with the smaller countries, simply because it’s more work right now than it’s worth. I get a sense that the whole system was rushed out, which, isn’t so bad necessarily, it’s just that there isn’t good support, not even someone to read and answer forums. I suspect that’s one of the reasons why Pages hasn’t been heavily promoted… they put it out as beta (without calling it so), and are allowing time for the bugs to get worked out and to learn more about what people want. I don’t think that’s such a bad approach, but it doesn’t seem like the support task is being taken seriously enough.