For the last three years I've constantly recommended Facebook ads. I recommend them to both B2C or B2B businesses. I recommend them to local theaters and comedians here in Charleston, SC. I recommend them to everyone who wants to grow awareness about anything they're doing.
How advertising has changed since the 20th century
Before the Internet, it was unlikely that the average person would advertise. Many businesses used the Yellow Pages or radio, but not all. Even in the first decade of the 21st century, only a percentage of companies used search advertising. Many found that pay-per-click was too expensive or too complicated for them.
Why Facebook Ads are the biggest marketing opportunity ever
With Facebook ads, we have a totally unique opportunity. There are several things about them never before seen together:
- They can reach as many people or more people as radio or TV, and in whatever country.
- They have sophisticated targeting like AdWords, albeit on different criteria.
- The minimum spend is just $1 per day.
- They are the lowest cost per 1,000 impressions ad in history. They average around $0.25 per 1,000, which is only 1% of the cost of TV. Are you kidding me? Nope, it's for real.
In other words, Facebook ads are mega-awareness raising, have good targeting, require very little commitment, and are unbelievably affordable.
Here's the one thing I tell people about Facebook ads that usually gets through:
If you just spend $1 per day on Facebook ads, you will get in front of 4,000 people that wouldn't have seen you otherwise. If you are doing that and your competitors aren't, you win the awareness game in your niche.
You can't sell to someone who doesn't know you exist, and you can't sell a product or service the consumer has never heard of.
If you can't spare $30 a month, you shouldn't be in business.
Facebook Ads for awareness and ROI
In my opinion, because of AdWords, many companies now underestimate the importance and value of awareness and mindshare. I drank the instant-ROI kool aid too; I was Mr. AdWords from 2004 until 2010. We still do it, but we also know its limits. It can harvest the low-hanging fruit and look good in terms of attribution, but it can't raise awareness affordably.
There are people in SEO and PR who look down on ads. I understand that aesthetic, but it's not as important as this opportunity. We know that organic Facebook without advertising is a tough road that's becoming more and more impassable. Pages with millions of fans find themselves only reaching 10s of thousands with their posts. Adding advertising to promote your posts ensures you get 10-100x the exposure of page posting alone. We have one big national brand client that's receiving $0.01 engagement clicks on several of their most engaging posts.
There are enough case studies of companies getting positive ROI from Facebook advertising to know that it's feasible. But there are a lot of companies doing Facebook poorly or without sufficient analytics. One stat said that 41% of B2B companies didn't have the tracking in place to know what Facebook was doing for them either way. In fact, as of a 2013 HubSpot survey, 34% of businesses either cannot or do not calculate their inbound ROI at all.
There's Facebook conversion tracking code you can use, and you can create ads that automatically optimize for conversions. Here's how to use it:
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Go to the Facebook Ad Manager.
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Look on the left for Conversion Tracking, and click on it.
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Click on the green box "Create Conversion Pixel."
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Give it a name you'll recognize, and choose what kind of conversion it is (e.g. a check, lead, or add to cart).
- Copy the JavaScript code and give it to your website person, or place it yourself. They actually recommend placing it in the <head> section.
Facebook Advertising targeting options
If you're not super-familiar, here are some of your targeting options (use one, a combination, or all):
- Geography
- Language
- Age
- Gender
- Workplace
- College
- Interests (including job titles)
- Categories
- Your own email lists
- Relationship status
- Education level
- College major
- School
I have worked on and seen other great case studies (a few examples are Marketo, InfiniGraph, Hubspot) of B2B Facebook advertising for lead gen. I've targeted media, bloggers, and journalists, and secured interviews I wouldn't have received otherwise.
Facebook also has retargeting options like AdWords does if you want to diversify your owned media beyond email and fans.
They're also great for promoting events. You can not only get people to join your event for sometimes as low as $0.15 each, you can also reach the friends of the people who've already said they're going.
Do at least $1 per day!
Altogether, Facebook advertising is a powerful platform with a lot of options, and given its power, your company should have someone testing our Facebook ads for it, even if it's just at $1 per day!
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Note: The survey embedded at the end of this post was closed, and has been removed.
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Hello Brian,
I enjoyed reading your post and I am glad that you have seen success through Facebook Advertising, however I would like to draw your attention, and get your opinion, on the Facebook Fraud video, by Veritasium.
I have an online E-Zine, we have a large and ever growing natural audience. Once my audience got to a certain level I started using Facebook Ad's because 1.) Facebook has made it extremely hard to get seen by the people that follow you, let alone those that don't and 2.) because Facebook themselves preach that Facebook Ad's is the way forward if you want your brand to be seen and grow through their platform.
So I started Advertising using Facebook Ad's. I locked my Ad's right down to a very specific target audience. My E-zine is only aimed at people in Scotland, interested in Alternative Culture. I know everything about my audience so I thought this would be great way for pushing my E-Zine in front of the exact people I want to read it.
My Ad's launched and yes, my page LIKES started to come in fast and strong; best of all the Ad's were, as you say, cheap so I was pleased. I continued this for a couple of weeks, whilst going about my usual Facebook activity. However, I started to notice something in my Facebook Insights.
Despite my rise in LIKES, my post engagement was decreasing at a rabid rate of naughts, people "talking about my page" also decreased, but my "reach" increased. Now up until I started doing Facebook Ad's an average post on my E-Zines Facebook would receive up to 500-1000 impressions, a whole bunch of LIKES and SHARES as well as engaged commenting. Post-Advertising, this basically dried right out across the board, yet my content strategy never changed.
Then I watched the above video and it was like everything made sense. Facebook works on engagement, not on how many people are following you. As soon as I stopped Advertising my E-Zine on Facebook, thus rapidly expanding my audience, my engagement increased again.
So basically what I'm saying is, I'd be very cautious towards using Facebook Advertising. I think there's still many loose bolts in the Facebook machine that need fixed and tightened before I would start investing any money in it.
I'd love to hear of any other Facebook Advertising successes or disasters?
Our experience across clients is that it's harder to reach fans without advertising. Everything we've learned about what kinds of posts get liked and shared (free exposure) still applies when you run post promotion ads. The more engaging the post, the lower the cost per engagement. We have one client right now (a big national OTC brand) getting $0.01 per engagement in the U.S. So do both. But keep the funnel in mind- you need to be raising awareness, growing your owned media, and converting to sales better- all three things at once. Facebook ads can help you measure lead and sale conversions if you use the tracking pixel.
I experience better reach and engagement when I don't use advertising at all. At least that way I know that the content I put out is being read, shared and valued by people who have actually bought in to what my page has to offer.
As mentioned above, Facebook Advertising is simply not transparent enough, I feel like my money is just gobbled up with very little insight as to why, where and with what result; and I am not alone.
My E-Zine covers a lot of local music. These bands and artists are constantly complaining that their Facebook pages are worthless because they can't reach the FANS that have apparently LIKED their page. They get told by Facebook to pay and promote their pages, but when they do they notice their engagement decrease and their pockets lighten.
I'm sorry but Facebook needs to get a grip and realise that it is crushing small businesses and organisations who have come to rely on Facebook as a way of promotion; but are now being squeezed for the right to do so.
Going to have to agree with Adwano. We've run a bunch of ads for clients on facebook. Every client that gets an ad, gets an increase in likes, but a decrease in engagment. If we build it naturally engagement stays proportional to our reach.
Well, we see at least 10x the exposure from running ads... I'm not sure what your experience is, but organic never reaches as many as paid does. And again, it's not impossible to get these engagements for less than $0.10.
Hi Adwano and Brian. I get both points about the engagement. In my view, ads are not to engage people, they are to sell something. So to that effect, when I want to announce something such as an event, I write a post about it and create an ad separately; even though they might be about same thing. That way, my followers can engage with the post for FREE and the ad can increase the visibility of the event and page. As you know, some will actually LIKE the page in the process.
When engagement dwindles I think it has more to do with lack of interest of the LIKER because that's what happens when you post the same type of stuff all the time. Mix it up. I promise your engagement will increase. When I post stuff about me and my wife on the business page, engagement skyrockets. That's why I know it has more to do with the type of info rather than FB trying to get money out of you.
This is the short version.
I agree with you Adwano. I too saw my likes go up quite substantially when I started running a targeted B2B campaign. Unfortunately, those likes were from completely non engaged people. My posts are seen by such a small percentage of my overall likes, it's very discouraging.
I'd like to not blame advertising for this, but I just haven't been impressed. And after watching the Facebook Fraud video and looking at the geographic breakdown of my page's likes, I have a overly large number of likes from Brazil, which is not and has never been my target at all. I remain skeptical. I'll test again but I'm not holding out a lot of hope.
My sense right now is that If you want likes, Facebook advertising is great. If you want engagement, I need more proof.
If you are getting likes from a country your not interested on then you haven't set your target audience correctly
We generally use Facebook ads for things besides fans. As above, yes, you can't get paid fans from the wrong countries unless you're using BOOST POST without targeting countries. We use FB ads primarily to increase awareness, engagement, get leads and get sales. To me, an email can be more valuable than a FB fan. But having both, AND retargeting, is best.
I've skimmed through this thread, and I think people may be thinking in too simplistic terms. It's either, "Facebook GOOD!" or "Facebook BAD!" But the issue is not binary. "Marketing" is too vague, and one-size-fits-all solutions never work.
The question: "Is Facebook advertising effective?" The answer? It depends. One of my personal websites is a fansite for a certain popular TV show, and Facebook is our best-performing channel for me. One of my company's clients is a mobile advertising platform, and Facebook is the worst-performing channel for them. I've seen other channels -- LinkedIn, Twitter, AdWords, etc. -- do both well and poorly depending on the context.
The key is to test and try many different channels (and to try different options and tactics within each channel) to see what works best for you and your specific context. I wish answers in digital marketing were clean-cut -- but if they were, forums such as Moz would be much more boring! :)
Tactical note: The aforementioned "Facebook Fraud" video is not as muckraking as people think. The producer seemed not to know how to use targeting and other options effectively. He likely advertised to people worldwide who liked his vague, test topic (was it cats?). Sure, that'll get a lot of fake "likes." But when I target very specific, niche interests in, say, the US, Canada, and the UK, I've never had such a problem. It all comes down to knowing how to use a channel well.
Hi Samuel,
Firstly, loved your post on PR as the new digital marketing!
Secondly,
The chap in that "Facebook Fraud" video may not have known or used targeting but I can assure you I do and have. I have an extremely targeted audience: People aged between 16 - 40, live in Scotland, have extremely precise interests relating to alternative culture, skateboarding, metal music, burlesque dancing ect.
I have years of experience in online paid advertising so I can whip up a nice little advert.
My problem is, that when I release one of these Ad's they bring in a huge amount of LIKES, but as a result, my post engagement starts to decrease and as a result those that usually really like and engage with our content have claimed that they haven't seen them. I've reviewed the new LIKES and their profiles and have often been left wondering why these people have been shown my Ad?
I'm not saying Facebook is BAD, I love Facebook, I just think they need to work on the advertising side of things and provide a service that is beneficial to all; not just those with large budgets who can pay to promote every post they put out.
Thanks for the comment on my PR post -- glad you liked!
The fact that you've had a huge amount of likes from a niche audience that resulted in lower engagement is interesting -- I've just hadn't seen that in my case. But every example is different -- which is why I guess Facebook ads are so controversial!
And yes, Facebook does need to work on its ad platform a lot. :)
Great post, I do want to point something out to Nouman Tariq, be careful of advertising for likes, there is a great youtube video titled "Facebook Fraud" about how much of these paid likes are actually non active users. This makes me wonder how much of the traffic you gain from advertising (not likes) is also non active.
Thanks for pointing out this to me but I don't think so its true. I have never experience getting fake likes by running Facebook Ads. There must be some fake news about "Facebook Fraud" All of the likes I get are real users and they stay engaged with our posts as well.
Very nice and informative post Brian thanks for sharing this here with all of us. I also want to add a suggestion for SmileyWar that you should watch the video again its about when you purchase some likes for your Facebook page from somewhere else but you can make a like optimized add for your page and get some real people likes that can benefit your business .
Khurram, I'm afraid it is you that needs to watch the video again. You have completely missed the point the video makes, which is:
Both 3rd party "paid likes" and Facebook Ad's generate a large amount of irrelevant LIKES that destroy your engagement and therefore reach on Facebook.
The article I wrote above doesn't talk at all about ads for fan growth. In my view, since the value of fans (as a way of organically distributing content) may decrease over time, we believe that fan growth is just one part of what you should be doing on Facebook. We've shifted our spend for some clients to 80% post promotion and only 20% fan growth. We advocate a diversified owned media growth strategy, meaning you need emails and remarketing, not just social fans and followers. For our clients that can track their sales (and some of our big brand clients can't, because they're sold through multiple retailers), we are doing a lot of experimentation with website conversion ads using the Facebook conversion pixel. The ultimate way to get value out of ads is to get paying customers. We're always striving to do that. Don't get stuck at the fan level. It seems to be an obsession with some people. If you create great posts and promote them with ads to fans and non-fans alike, you can get new fans who enjoyed your posts before they even fanned you.
Perhaps not directly, but your post title states "Every Business Should Spend at Least $1 per Day on Facebook Ads" which on a channel like Moz will be swallowed up and believed by the masses; including small businesses, charities, bands and artists ect. You say its a good thing when in fact many would disagree.
Even Post Promotion is an area that I think is very much still in the grey. I have promoted posts in the past and felt that I might as well have thrown my money down the nearest drain. You could argue that this is due to my content being weak, but I can assure you that our content is extremely targeted to our readers, which is reflected in our feedback.
The reason that my Promote a Post isn't doing well, in my opinion, is because Facebook isn't actually Promoting at all, its goign otu to people that have LIKED the page as a result of Advertsing on Facebook, that are not engaged or active in teh first place.
Its a highly flawed advertising structure and until I actually see it improve my money will remain in my pocket or in other avenues that I do see quality return!
I've taught extensively (altho as yet I lack a great link to point you to) on why I think that it's important to try to hold Facebook ads to an ROI standard, but ultimately their natural strength is in awareness raising and engagement. I teach a whole-funnel perspective where you use each channel for its natural strengths. A simple version of that would be to use FB and YT ads to grow owned media lists (not just fans), then repeat contact people and drive them toward the sale. Every business is different in how they get people from awareness to sale, but every business can benefit from greater awareness, especially the local ones that people 5 miles away don't even know exist. You can't sell to customers who aren't aware of you. ROI is critical, but it's not an either/or proposition. Focusing on ROI does not exempt you from needing awareness and mindshare. :-)
That said, there are also cases where we have clear FB ad lead gen. If you get the tracking in place and run enough tests, you can see it working. You add that to your AdWords ads and everything else, and you have a powerful marketing machine. In my experience, it's more about how much you can allocate to each channel than totally excluding any of them. But Facebook ads are time intensive, so I can see leaving them off in some cases. Oh no I hedged on my article title! ;-D
I must say that Facebook is not a worthy platform for advertising. The tests I have done a year ago, showed that the pixel conversion was 0%. One of my customers wanted me to do a test in the retail of car accessories. So I targeted people only in the UK and enthusiasts for vehicles. The budget was £200 and the return was £0.
It simply was not working. I must admit that I thought it would work and that sales would be rolling down, but reality slapped me in the face and quickly made me realize that Facebook users are not interested in advertising.
I know your own statistics say they do work, but unfortunately they don't seem to work for me. And as much as £200 is peanuts, its enough money to understand that my tests have proven that the advertising failed.
That's definitely a small amount of money to spend testing an entire network, one that is so powerful for other people. Either it will not work for your business, or you didn't find the right ad creative + landing page etc. There's a lot to test, and sometimes there are tracking issues too. If you didn't create "website conversions" goal ads, that may be the problem. Still, I would expect to commit more money than that to diligently test Facebook ads.
AdWords is no different- you can expect to spend hundreds if not thousands finding the high ROI formula for your business. A number of my clients and other businesses have found that the real ROI is only in 5-10 keywords. The rest aren't profitable. So then you have a volume problem- how do you get more people into your funnel? The answer is the channels that are better at the top of the funnel, like Facebook ads and YouTube ads.
I find it interesting how you reply Brian Carter, I mean I'm trying to be very polite, but you seem to always answer like Nick Naylor explaining how to convince people that chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla.
Every person has room to improve on how to advertise, but I have done enough advertising to know that the conversion rate of £200 has to be above 1% to be considered even remotely viable. I work on a 30k yearly advertising campaign for the past 5 years and know what I should expect from what amount of money you put in.
Its very possible that the tracking did not work, there was allot of clicks and views, but no comments on the ad, nor did I notice an increase in sales of this particular product.
I see allot of replies all over the place about how ineffective facebook advertising is. Maybe if you have the time, show us how to do advertising on Facebook. We are all to help each other right? As you have so kindly shown us already in this article :)
And btw im from an eCommerce environment so promoting blogs and articles is not what I did. But sell real objects.
Anyway thanks for all the replies! :)
Yes, we have gotten great profits for some companies with Facebook ads. Tracked conversions and clear cost per sale below the margin. I'm not saying one flavor of ice cream is better. I'm saying Facebook ads do work, but it's a different system. If you have no experience with them and don't get education from someone who has, there is a really good chance you'll fail with them. I wish they were simpler and it was cheaper to test them and find the best settings for profits but it's not. AdWords is similar- there's a ton of waste you can eliminate over time, and regardless it takes more money upfront to find what works.
I've been using Facebook ads for a side-project website I've been working on, mostly to grow my fan and follower base. Even just a $5 a day has had a pretty significant impact on the amount of exposure my Facebook page has received. I'm sure it will flatten out sooner or later, but for now it's a relatively small investment to reach the goals I am going for.
Nice! Tip: focus on post promo ads and keep changing the content and it shouldn't flatten out.
In response to Vernal_Pond & Brian, The account I just pulled up to check had a default of $5/day but it did let me change it to $1/day.
I agree that virtually every business should be running Facebook ads. But they have to be set up the right way or it can be a huge waste of time and money. That's my response to the Facebook Fraud video as well - it's all in how the ads are created and targeted. Jon Loomer posted a great response to that video. I think that video did a great disservice just pointing out a skewed result instead of explaining why ads could attract those fakes and how to minimize it. Sensationalism is rarely constructive.
I've read Jon's post and I do know how to set up well targeted Ad's. The problem that I see is that as soon as my audience sky rockets in LIKES, my engagement falls. Without that engagement, my everyday posts (not the ad's or promoted posts ect) hardly get seen.
I love Facebook, the majority of my E-Zines traffic comes from Facebook, but I just think that the way it operates (forcing you to pay) towards how pages & posts are seen by those who have freely opted into your page via a LIKE; is at the moment flawed in itself.
Like Jon says in his post, my strategy is to grow my audience. I'm not selling anything nor does my E-Zine make any money. But Facebook has me trapped in a scenario that I either pay to grow that audience, or I suffer. My point is even when I do pay, through loss of engagement, I still suffer.
Every few years since 1999, there has been some kind of new opportunity (platforms and channels like Google, SEO, AdSense, FB organic, pinterest etc). Initially you can find ways to get big returns even without spending money. But as time goes on, and it's more and more adopted, and the competition grows and the successful comapnies get profitable, it becomes harder for the same people who did well early to compete. This cycle keeps repeating. It's not ideal to have a business model that relies on that- but if you do, you have to start looking for the next big opportunity. Generally speaking it's very hard to do business these days without advertising. There are always exceptions, but the rule is you need to expect to spend some money on marketing and/or advertising to do business.
What I keep seeing in these responses is the assumption that you're using FB ads to grow fans. THAT'S NOT THE BEST USE OF FACEBOOK ADS.
USE THEM TO GROW POST ENGAGEMENT (even targeting existing fans of the page)
USE FB ADS TO GET LEADS AND SALES.
Gosh this is driving me crazy Adwano. The plural of Ad is....ads. NOT ad's!
Learning how to promote your website on Facebook, and more importantly, with a positive ROI, is very important, especially if you're looking for a specific type of customers. (same thing about Twitter).
I'm completely new to using social media to increase business. I'm a front-end developer by trade, so I always find myself trying to soak in the best strategies. This is one of them.
That said, I want to put a pin on the suggestion from Facebook to place JavaScript in the head of a document. Performance is a huge metric in conversion, and while tracking FB conversion is important, I would be sure to keep as much JS at the end of your documents.
Brian,
Great post and I do agree that every company should be using FaceBook Ads to some degree. But, I've notice in the past FaceBook stats not adding up. Example, last week I ran ads for 5 days to a web on our website, Facebook showed 54 click to our site but, Google analytics only showed 10 clicks to that page. Have you ever come across this and if so, how do you explain it?
My tests showed that 30-60% of Facebook traffic is tracked as "Direct" by GA. You must use Google URL Builder to tag your ad and post links if you want accurate tracking in GA.
Brian - Thanks for the interesting post on Facebook advertising. It has certainly triggered a debate on the merits and effectiveness of Facebook advertising.
Our experience on using it for clients is that used correctly Facebook can be a great advertising channel. I loved your comment on “instant-ROI kool aid”…
We’ve found that where clients have tried to compare Facebook and search marketing through ROI measured in Google Analytics - Facebook more often than not looks more expensive. As you pointed out this is because Facebook is best used as an awareness advertising method and search marketing is generally a direct response advertising method. It's a common mistake to compare Facebook advertising and search advertising using direct conversion metrics – it’s also dangerous. Awareness advertising generally won’t compare well if you do, and the chances are you’ll be switching off a great advertising channel.
I could write an essay on the best way of measuring each channel to get a true measure of ROI. Best left for a blog post I think... The main thing is to work out how to use each type of advertising most effectively – as your post explains well - with the power of Facebook’s reach it worth putting the time and money in.
Hey Brian,
I wanted to let you know that we talked about your post on the Daily Blogcast for internet marketing podcast. If you want to listen to it, you can find it here:
Email Anyone (Without Knowing Their Email Address) Using Facebook (Ep. 079) dailyblogcast.net/2014/02/27/email-anyone-without-knowing-their-email-address-using-facebook-ep-079/
Very true. There are a lot of other paid media channels besides Adwords that can be very lucrative and profitable for your digital advertising campaigns. Linkedin and Outbrain are some other quality channels to promote content to related audiences as well.
I really appreciate your work Brian Carter. Your post is most beneficial of all businesses, especially e-commerce websites. I have one question, Last year I got at least 1000-1500 like just spending 20$ or 30$. I was happy that response was very good and excellent. But after 2 or 3 days, most of users unlike my business webpage, In fact there are a lot of products available at discounted price and more offers as well. Can you explain what was the reason behind it?
And is it true that face book give us fake likes or irrelevant like?
I have never heard of that kind of behavior. Most people are too lazy to go unlike a page. This sounds more like it might be from buying 5,000 fans rather than using FB ads?
There is a figure out there on fake profiles, and I believe it was less than 10%.
Try to be smart in this world, let use everything, but keep eyes from where getting maximum profit and in my opinion s e o is the one that boost any business in much better way because of change of SEO strategy that makes to offer Social Media.
Just for a small data point in this discussion. I started a Facebook ad campaign on Feb. 19th at $1 a day. Here are the results so far (Half way through March 7th):
Total spent: $25
Likes: 11 (11 that have not unliked...yet ~20 likes in total, but they have 'unliked' very fast)
Impressions: 232
Clicks: 5
Social Clicks: 0
Click through rate: 2.551%
Cost per 1,000 impressions: $22.91 for regular ads, $7.50 for sponsored stories
Its probably just too small of an amount to really put any weight into....I'd be curious if others had similar results. I have never used Adwords or anything else, how does this compare to other's numbers? Cost per impression seems VERY high....but again, it is such a small campaign I'm not sure if you can put any real weight on the results.
Just read here that Twitters ad rates are declining sharply:
https://qz.com/185236/twitter-ad-rates-continue-falling-down-18-last-quarter/
How do the costs/results compare?
Those are not so great. Did you create the ad in ad manager rather than BOOSTing? Did you test 5-10 ads? Different targets and images and copy? What was the size of your target audience?
I think most people are unaware of how to advertise on facebook. I know I was doing it wrong.
I've been testing running ads targeted at specific audiences. The ads automatically run every time I make a post so they amplify my engagement. All for a few dollars a day.
You all might want to check out this 3 campaign system that focuses on audience, engagement and conversion.
Hey Brian,
Great post. With the very low cost and high level of targeting, Facebook ads are a very valuable resource that many small businesses are ignoring. I think this is happening because the transition from free is tough and many are feeling strong armed by the recent and obvious drop in organic reach. The fact is though, they should have been supplementing organic reach on important posts before. But in the present, like you say, for a limited budget, you can reach more people than you ever did before. It makes sense. I thought this would be useful for our blog readers, so I included your post in my roundup of February's best social media, SEO, and content marketing articles. https://www.northcutt.com/blog/2014/03/february-round-up-best-seo-social-media-and-content-marketing/ Thanks.
Ben
Hi Brian,
We found this really interesting and the adverting chart in particular really got me thinking.
As a result, I thought it would be a fun exercise to not only look at the cheapest, quick wins in online advertising, but also to correlate that data with the emotional impact of various platforms. The results are really interesting, online still wins - but it suggests the chasm isn't as vast as we could easily assume.
Please let me know your thoughts: https://www.hhglobal.com/blog/the-most-cost-effective-advertising-platforms
Those are some great charts! Sorry I missed this comment for so long.
Nice Post, I agree that virtually every business should be running Facebook ads.There are many options for promote your business but Facebook Ads is best option. Its help to reach thousands of people without spending too much money.
I think it makes sense to frequently be testing different kinds of ads, given how important Facebook could be for many businesses, but I don't think it necessarily needs to be $1 per day. You can skip a few days and see how traffic naturally flows.
Great point - and one that seems to be forgotten all the time: the importance of testing. Like any marketing channel, Facebook ads can either be a complete waste of money, or return a decent ROI. The way to make sure that you're getting good ROI is simple: test, test and test again.
Brian, how do you handle attribution with FB ads, or do you pay less attention on these campaigns since you're trying to build more "awareness" as you put it? Do you look at view based conversions or only clicks? Any tips?
We always try to push for conversion tracking on sales or leads.
But many businesses can't track their sales accurately back to the original online channel.
Consumer packaged goods clients like Pediacare, Chloraseptic and Dramamine sell their products in many retail outlets- those stores like Walmart and CVS compete, and do not make it possible for brands to track retail sales back to online marketing. As a result, all we can measure online is awareness, web traffic, social engagement, and coupons. And even online coupon-creation services don't make it easy to track online advertising success. These clients know that we're generating super affordable awareness, we're making their website traffic much more affordable,
Some of our B2B clients use us to generate leads via Google ads, Facebook ads, ebooks and whitepapers- but not all of these companies use a modern CRM. As a result, we can increase their leads and lower their cost per lead, it's clear we've improved their lead pipelines and they can convert those leads to sales, but the exact ROI number is difficult to find.
A bunch of B2B companies like this are still making the transition to 21st century marketing and sales. Many of them have succeeded so far on word of mouth, but to grow further, they need to add online advertising and a modern CRM.
Any company with the ability to track their sales back to the online source has a real advantage, because that information can be used to eliminate waste and increase profits.
Love FB Ads. However, taking subject title for face value, "Why Every Business Should Spend at Least $1 per Day on Facebook Ads" - if this happened, $1 wouldn't get you far any more. :)
Not sure what you mean- we haven't seen appreciable cost increases. As always, its affordability is proportional to the amount of testing we do. We still can get <$0.30 fans and sometimes engagement at $0.01 per. My main point is that it is the absolute cheapest targeted awareness possible anywhere.
Very interesting read. One question, where is the data from for the Cost per 1000 People reached chart? And is it really people or impressions?
"Cost To Reach 1000 People"
Looks interesting, but what's the source for this graph/ data? I don't see any attribution.
This post has almost 2 years but this remain the same way.
I'm testing low budgets (1$/day) campaigns and I'm getting targeted likes on my page for only 0.15$/0.20$
That's wonderful results since i do a lot of research on targeting the clients.
Thanks Brian Carter!
There is a massive opportunity with Facebook Video Ads. The engagement I am seeing is crazy verse the standard image ads.
Great point! Spending $1 a your business in front of thousands of people should create more than $1 of value for your business. The reality is that Facebook has created a place where people want to be. We can interact with them for free or enhance our reach by paying money. Thanks for writing!
Yeah. Actually it's facebook's way of getting regular clients making pay by showing those downwards trend graph and giving priority to premium user ( Paid ads ) :) You should use those same product images on some popular business portals like IndiaBizClub to leverage most out of that images :)
Hi Brian, Nice article. I have one question in mind - If i am going to spend money on Facebook then no doubt that i will get likes. These likes will be authentic, Any guarantee Facebook gives?
I am actually using some other websites for increasing likes and shares on social media websites pages but after sometimes these likes start disappearing. It may also happen with Facebook ads. facebook have purchased wats app but how it is going to benefit my business or page on which i am running facebook ad campaign?
Hello Brian,
Congratulations for your FANTASTIC article about Facebook Ads...
Greetings from Belgium :-)
Sincerely,
Alex2Marketing
Interesting concept Brian, good post. I would add to that at least $10-20 per month of Twitter advertisign as well.
For my money, it's FB rather than Twitter, because FB ads give you way more targeting options. My tests show cost per follower on Tw are usually >$1 and again there aren't too many settings to test to try to lower it. I also wonder if people on Tw are more opposed to sponsored posts- but the costs are just much higher on a social network with 1/5th the users, so usually we don't use Tw ads.
Hi Brian, great article. There is a lot of misunderstanding on how to effectively use Facebook ads and because of this people often don't see the results they would like. Before doing any ads, first you must decide on what your objective is. For example, I often use Facebook ads for list building for myself and for my clients. I have found it to be the cheapest and quickest way to build high converting lists. The ads I use for list building don't add much to page likes, and they aren't meant to. They don't increase engagement much, but that isn't my objective either. My objective is to build a highly targeted email list.
Too often people focus on page likes. Page likes may give Social Proof when first creating a page, and this can be a positive thing. And, doing a Like campaign to build targeted likes is a quick, and can be an inexpensive way to build this Social Proof. Another side benefit of a Like campaign is that it immediately increases your Reach, the number of people seeing your post.
But, a Like campaign ad is a very different type of ad than an ad used for List Building, or even to make a sale. You should never use newsfeed ads for a Like campaign, for example. They are too expensive. However, for a list building campaign or sales ad, a newsfeed ad has great visibility and large images to make an impact.
It's true and it only makes sense that a Like campaign may decrease the percentage of engagement. But, if you want more engagement, then why do a Like campaign? Why not tailor your ad for more engagement? Facebook even helps you do this - it will show ads to people they know engage more with posts when you specify engagement as an objective. That being said, I would not spend the money to increase engagement, I would spend it to increase sales. If you are after better engagement create more engaging content.
People who are overly concerned about Likes or even Engagement are often missing the whole objective for advertising in the first place. If your object is to increase sales, then you must tailor your ads to do so. If your objective is to build a high converting list, then your ads must reflect this. Placing ads to increase Likes or even Engagement, except maybe for young page to quickly increase its Social Proof as I mentioned above, is not money well spent. Why not spend the money on ads that will convert Facebook Fans to customers instead?
I know this post is six months old, but I found it useful and I want it to work. However, I am not getting $0.25/1000. It is closer to $4.00/1000. What am I doing wrong? If Mr. Carter would like to contact me, I'd love to talk this through with him. ;-)
Thanks!
I would never spend money on paid advertising. There are so many things that you can do for free instead of wasting your money on advertising to sites like Google and Facebook. You can take the money that you are going to spend on paid advertising and invest on a long term promotion tactics. Paid advertising is a short term and rarely converts or bring the value back or even brake even to the amount that you have spend on advertising. If your product is good and you believe in it you should talk about to people and tell them how they can use it to their benefit in a creative way. Please do not waste your money on paid advertising. I will never spend any money on paid advertising for my website APPTHUGS [link removed] it is a brand new site and we do android application reviews and I am still building content, but I have a plan as to how I am going to market it and promote it when the time is right. Plan your strategy and be creative.
Even things you do for free take time, and you do need to make sure they're effective. For example, many blog sites (Moz included) automatically nofollow links in comments, and remove unrelated links. If a free strategy you're using includes blog commenting with linking in hopes of followed links from high DA sites, you may want to reconsider some of that strategy.
absolutely not you may remove the website name completely The reason I provided the website name so that people can see how I am engaging with the users even though it's a very new website I am engaging with users who in return are talking about it because they find it useful. People are talking about my website on other sites and promoting my site for free only because I am providing good useful content and even though its not driving a lot of traffic at the moment but it is increasing by each day that pass by, which is more than you get from paid likes. It's not important if there are 1,000 likes and no one is interested in your services or products they are just paid likes which more than often people mute the feed on their page because they are not interested in engaging with the website and eventually they will unlike the page. Most of the likes are fake believe it or not they are generated automatically by fake profiles that facebook has created for just that purpose, i found that out by looking at the people's profiles who like the pages and have not been active in over a year but apparently there is a fresh like from them? I wonder how. There is no content as a real user will post on their facebook profile, I guess those people just wanted to create a fb to like bunch of pages so they just watch their feed stream. It's about getting the right people who actually benefit from your site and will use your services and people who like or follow your brand are more than likely to help your business to a success then fake FB likes. and if any one wants to disprove me lets start a new website and create a FB campaign and see if I get more user response or the fake likes of fb does.
I'm planning to use Facebook ads for recruitment. What attracts me is the targeting: I can get people with X qualifications in academic subject Y, between the ages of 20 and 27, in country Z. Where else could I get such specificity? I don't want anyone outside a very narrow range of people, and (it seems) Facebook may deliver.
I would add that we have no interest in getting Facebook "Likes". We just want to deliver appropriate leads to our job advertising page.
I'm wondering why more people don't use Facebook for such highly targeted lead-generation?
FB ads may not be right for every business. I don't really like FB all that much, but I do find it quite useful for marketing and market research.
From what I read in most of the negative comments, people have either set up their campaign incorrectly or are expecting immediate purchases and overnight success.
Running an ad for a week is not a campaign. It's a small test, that may not yield anything.
If you don't want likes from Brazil then don't include Brazil in your target audience, better yet exclude them completely.
I would say that 20 clicks from 5000 views is not really that bad. If you compare to traditional TV ads, you don't suddenly get a million people wanting to buy a Sofa from Harvey Norman (Australian Dept store) after seeing the ad in prime time. But they did see the ad and may well think of going there when they do want a sofa.
Then again it may be pitched at the wrong people. Like Brian says you have to keep trying different things. That or pay $1000s to some marketing genius.
It takes time to build up brand awareness and trust.
With such short attention spans I find that FB users need fresh ads every 1 to 2 weeks. It's not easy coming up with that much fresh content, but you need to keep doing it.
Nice post!
so how much does optimizing your ad for your website, as opposed to clicks and impressions, get you in terms of views? I find myself in the dark with how much my ads will actually show for $1/day
We pulled all our Facebook ads after Facebook used the face of a girl who committed suicide to escape cyber bullying in online dating ads. It is not somewhere we would want to go back to or suggest to others.
An informative post , but i want to know why there is always a conflict between Facebook Website Clicks & Google Analytics?.
The figures are never the same,infact the Facebook clicks always exceed Analytics reported visitors.
For some reason a lot of it goes into Direct. I think Google is the one to ask about that. :-)
We always use google url builder (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en) to put extra parameters in. GA is frustrating in that you can't always get some of those in every report, but you can get source/medium, so I usually go with Facebook/fbads... like this: https://example.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=fbads
I purposely don't use cpc as medium just to be visually sure it's my traffic. Technically you should do this for your Facebook post URL's too if you want to track it accurately.
When tracked that way, you should find the visits and clicks line up a lot closer, not off by any more than most analytics are.
We had this same discrepancy issue for one of our client accounts. After running a "Website Visits" campaign, FB Analytics reported 1,855 website clicks from FB to the client's website, but when I checked the Google Analytics, the client's website only showed 600 visits, which wasn't materially different from the previous months' organic traffic. So I posed the question to our FB Ad rep for an explanation because I couldn't make sense of it, and here's what he told me:
One of the main reasons you'll see a high difference in Google Analytics and Facebook's advertising report is secure browsing. What Facebook is tracking is clicks on your ad that are delivered away to your website, we are able to track this no matter which secure network users are on due to the action they take (the click), while Google Analytics (while I'm not able to speak 100% to how they work) are only able to track the source of people who are not on a secure network. Most users on a mobile device on a secure network, as well as most of the traffic delivered from Facebook is, as well. This is going to effect the results in the way you are looking at them.
I dug deeper into the Google Analytics and even though FB referral visits in December and November were not materially different, there was a sizable increase in FB referral visits pre-FB Ad spend versus post-FB Ad spend (78% increase compared to Sept 2013; 53% increase compared to Oct 2013; 319% increase compared to Dec 2012). So based on this limited sample size, it seems as though the “Website Clicks” campaign and the general “FB Likes” campaign generate roughly the same external website traffic. This was on a $500 investment in "Website Clicks", by the way.
Hope that helps.
This comprehensive article from business insiders which is more than a year old does not bring much goodness towards facebook's advertising program.
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-advertisers-invalid-click-class-action-lawsuit-2012-10
I have found, like you, that Facebook is very cheap to run and the ROIis astronomical when compared to adwords etc.I was skeptical before starting to use Facebook ads but I was pleasantly surprised with results.
Was your suggestion of $1/day just theoretical? After reading the piece today I jumped over to place that $1/day bet at FB and found that denomination is not an option. $5/day seems to be a minimum. Thanks.
Our FB rep said the $1 a day is the minimum. See the previous poster who said that the default was $5/day but she was able to change it to $1.
Our FB rep said the $1 a day is the minimum. See the previous poster who said that the default was $5/day but she was able to change it to $1.
Good article. Although it seems as if you have invested in Facebook stocks :)
Funny :-) but let me take you seriously and say no- my investments are spread out. I would never invest in just one stock, in the same way I would not recommend you have just one typed of owned media (FB fans)- diversify. It may just sound markety because my way of writing copy has infected how I blog :-) but also because I think people are #1 missing the value of awareness and mindshare and #2 not working hard enough on getting emails and conversions from their fans. In fact, our agency does many different strategies and tactics (including alternatives like AdWords, Twitter ads, YouTube pre-roll, and creating posts more likely to get shared), which allows us to be a bit more objective in our recommendations. In digital marketing tend to focus on channels and tactics where I see outsized advantages for my clients, and where I see strange reluctance or inertia in the industry.
Very nice article Brian.. since Facebook it's not what I usually do I never noticed that you could just spend so little to get that kind of exposure. When I'll have the chance I'll propose that to clients for sure in the future.
Just something I'm not sure about: from the post I understand something like "for just 1 dollar a day for ads you should always do it, you won't find anything else that cheap, so it won't hurt", but is that true? Is there no possibility that it can hurt your product/brand/service, if it's done just because it's cheap?
Great article!, yes, I do believe in advertising on FB not because everybody is doing it.
But, that FB gives you that ability to brand yourself & lengthen your reach across people of similar interest.
I did a small campaign and compared the success between FB & G Adwords. (this was supported with mixpanel for tracking events)
By far in our test FB had more reach and total costs on ROI performed better when we looked at the content that was being shared.
That's great- so it was an event attendance ad test? Would love to hear more detail about that case study - contact me here if you like: https://briancarteryeah.com/blog/contact/ thanks!
I also just started running an ad campaign for an event @ $2 per day. We'll see how that turns out.
From what I've seen and experienced, the best way to use Facebook Ads is to do promoted posts, not gather Likes, specially if you're a local business. If you are in business, I'm pretty sure you at least have your clients as followers on Facebook. A promoted posts campaign will help you reach their (real) friends, so in case the famous Facebook fraud video is true (which I doubt), you wouldn't have a problem with that. Remember that Social Media marketing is a digital form of word of mouth, and WOM usually does not work with strangers. So start by hustling to get real followers to whom you are already connected to somehow, and then use Facebook promoted posts to reach their (real) friends. And, as the above article says, you don't need a big budget, so why not give it a try for yourself and base your opinion on real numbers? As marketers we should not just rely on what other say. Each project and each campaign is different, so don't even take my word for it. Try it out. It could turn out to be a nice little social media case study to show your clients! :)
Does anyone else think that Facebook Ads are a good glimpse into what Google has planned for us all with G+/Search integration? The sort of overly-familiar, worryingly knowing, laser-targeted reference to something you once said, liked or made a passing comment on.
Ethics aside, this sort of targeting is really clumsy, isn't it?
I'm going to go buy some FB stocks right now!
Best quote "If you can't spare $30 a month, you shouldn't be in business." Sold!! Just started my first Facebook Ad campaign today. SO EASY!
thanks for the article. very interesting. i've always put off facebook ads, but now i am going to have to start.
This is the power of facebook! Every businesses wanted to run some Ads in fb because they know that they can have some return of investments when doing it. Great post Brian!
A few months ago I ran a campaign on Facebook for $1 a day. I targeted Specific users with interests in Tanning between the ages of 19 and 40 who lived in Vancouver. I wasn't expecting much.
I was disappointed when I was reviewing the results. When I was looking at the user list of likes for every 2-3 likes it seems like Facebook was only reporting to me 1 user.
Recently I watched the "Facebook Fraud" video, and it made a lot of sense to me and I started thinking.
Either:
A) Facebook is increasing likes falsely
B) Facebook is hiding users from me due to privacy settings and want me to have good faith they are there
C) They were Fake likes and Facebook had deleted the accounts and not the fake likes
I also have been an entertainer for the past 16 years. My Facebook account has 1200+ friends on it. People randomly add me all the time. Some of these people show obvious symptoms of being fans of my entertainment field....but there all lots just randomly adding me and they sound just like the fake like users in the "Facebook Fraud" video.
I would be extremely cautious advertising with Facebook at this point.
If you are doing a good job engaging your users and getting them to talk it might be worth it regardless if there are fake likes occurring. Even with legitimate likes if you aren't engaging them correctly they are about as effective as the fake likes that will never engage.
I personally would like to add one thing, that you are suggested to run Facebook ads if you are having your own E-Commerce Website, only $1 will give you immense engagement with people who may be interested in your products.
Dear Moz & Brian Carter,
No I don't want Indian Farm Clickers, nor I want Egyptian Like clickers, not even Bangladesh, or Saudi Arabi 'like' clickers. No, I won't pay $Facebook.
Thank you for great post Brian. I am finding information about Mobile Facebook Advertisement specifically to get a download of iOS Application on iPhone only. If i get some information it will be good !
Very good tips in here Brian. Thanks for the post :)
Awesome post Brian; Facebook Ads are really effective and are cheaper than any other Advertising Channel. I have run facebook ads for one my client in order to increase our likes and we get more than 200 new likes by spending only 7$. It’s really cheap and I would recommend everyone to try it if you have never used it till now.
Also complete the Carter Group's 2014 Digital Advertising Survey and looking forward to see the survey result. :)
I think Facebook is the best social media site and become popular worldwide with a huge number of users.
Great post..There are many options for promote your business but Facebook Ads is best option. Its help to reach thousands of people without spending too much money. You right every business owner should spend money on Facebook Ads to enlarge their business. I have a great experience of Facebook Ads, i got real users from it.
Fantastic, I know all these points you mentioned but still i really enjoyed this post.. Good Job
I'm shocked to know that we've to pay lesser money ever for advertisement on Facebook. That would be a great deal to promote our website. Pleased to read this post @Brian Carter.
Great Job Brian, Facebook has more than 1.23 million users, 757 million of which are active on any given day. Each of these members has an average of 130 Friends. With this amount of exposure the possibilities are endless. Just think of the amount of people who could potentially be exposed to your business through a well thought, effective Facebook Advertisement.
Hate to be that guy, but it's actually over 1.23 billion, and more than 757 million are active daily. :-)
Ketan, that statement may have been true in September, 2012, when it was published on a blog at https://likeabossmedia.com/the-benefits-of-facebook-advertising/. We ask that your comments on Moz be original, and not copied from another site. Thanks!
The friend information has been updated as well. There are some interesting statistics at
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/02/03/6-new-facts-about-facebook/.
But When we do paid marketing on facebook it gets us 30 % fake likes which affects our marketing reach to client. But as Facebook has purchased watsapp, As Brian Carter said it is worth to spend now on facebooks ads because now onwoards facebook will have more 3 million contacts from WATS app which is huge. There will be lot new facts about facebook now on words.