There's been a lot of buzz around Facebook's Promoted Post feature over the past few months. I've read several blog posts (the HasOffers post was great) who have tried testing the effectiveness of Promoted Posts vs Facebook's Sponsored Story ads, and thought it would be interesting to do a similar test here at SEOmoz. Before I jump in to the results of my test, I'll give a quick overview on Promoted Posts for those who aren't familiar.
What's the Difference Between a Promoted Post and a Sponsored Story?
Facebook rolled out their Promoted Post feature at the end of May, allowing Brand Page owners to pay to push content to a broader audience than normal. What some people don't know is that when you publish content on your Facebook Brand Page, only a small percentage of your fans are seeing that content appear in their news feeds.
Facebook uses its complex EdgeRank algorithm to determine which content each user sees in their news feed. Facebook estimates that only 16% of a company's fans will see every post they generate in their news feed. Some companies will obviously have a much higher percentage of engaged fans than others, but it shows that simply publishing content on your Brand Page won't get it seen by 100% of your audience.
So, this is where Promoted Posts come in handy. You now can dedicate up to $100 to "promote" a recent post on your Facebook Brand Page. Facebook says, "Your promoted posts will be seen by a larger percentage of the people who like your page than would normally see it. It will also be seen by a larger percentage of the friends of people who interact with your post." What this means is that Facebook will distribute your content to a much broader segment of your fan base instead of just the fans who are already engaged with your brand. Sounds interesting, right?
Now, let's quickly discuss another tool for distributing your content on Facebook to a broad audience. Facebook's Sponsored Story is created within the Facebook Ad Platform and functions just like a Facebook Ad. You can set this up the same way as you set up Facebook Ads and select your targeting from the large list of available targeting and interest category options that Facebook provides. You'll create an ad image, write your ad copy, link to your content, assign a budget, set your bid, and then activate it. The main difference is that Sponsored Stories look like Facebook ads so they only appear in the right side of the Facebook Page where all the other ads are, and they will mainly target people who aren't fans of your Brand Page.
The Test: Promoted Post vs Sponsored Story
Show me the results, baby! We decided to use a recent update to our Beginner's Guide to SEO as the content piece that we would Promote and run in our Sponsored Story. For the Promoted Post, we created a simple post on our Brand Page linking to the Beginner's Guide and dedicated $100 to it. This Post had a reach of 26,275. It generated 198 actions, 1,311 clicks and had a CTR of 4.99%. The CPC was $.076.
For the Sponsored Story, we targeted 266,580 people who live in the US, Canada, UK, or Australia and like SEO related topics and websites. The actual reach of the campaign was 44,247 with a frequency of 6.2. This Sponsored Story generated 16 actions, 162 clicks, had a CTR of 0.366% and a CPC of $1.44.
As you can see from our test results, the Promoted Post generated far more engagement than the Sponsored Story, had a higher CTR, and had a significantly lower CPC!
| Campaign Reach | Actions | Clicks | CTR | Spend | CPC | |
| Promoted Post | 26,275 | 198 | 1,311 | 4.990% | $100.00 | $0.076 |
| Sponsored Story | 44,247 | 16 | 162 | 0.366% | $233.47 | $1.441 |
The only area that the Sponsored Story out-performed the Promoted Post was in campaign reach. This makes sense since we were targeting a large group of SEO professionals and enthusiasts through Facebook Ads' interest targeting. At the end of the day, our Promoted Post to our fans who had not engaged with us in a significant amount of time generated a huge amount of interest in our content and drove a majority of the actions and clicks on our post.
To conclude, the combination of a Promoted Post and a Sponsored Story helped us to achieve metrics on our post that we have never seen before on our Brand Page.
This was our most viewed post ever (more than 5x's the previous record and was also the most liked and most shared)! While this didn't necessarily generate revenue for us, it was great to see how the Promoted Post and Sponsored Story can work together to achieve massive reach and engagement. The next step will be to see how the Promoted Post and Sponsored Story tools perform when driving a promotional offer or direct CTA type of content.
In the end, the main thing this test taught us was that it's important for every advertiser and brand to test things on their own. Just because one company sees a certain set of results doesn't mean that your company will see the same. Every brand, fan base, target audience, and customer base is different and will react differently so what it boils down to in my opinion is test, test, and test again.
I hope this analysis was helpful, and I'd love to hear from any of you who've run similar tests or messed around with the Promoted Post and Sponsored Story to see what types of results you've experienced.
It might be an obvious statement but in this article you are comparing apples and oranges for all intensive purposes and can learn very little from a direct comparison.
Promoted posts reach your existing fans and through experience the cost to target existing fans through sponsored stories is considerably lower.
Your sponsored stories are targeting people who I assume (correct me if I'm wrong but your target audience is a larger number than your current fan base) aren't connected to your page so this will result in much lower engagement rates.
Also, your promoted post will appear in full within fans news feeds whereas your sponsored story is truncated and won't deliver the full message: "check it out if you need..." Need what?
I am a big fan of promoted posts and find them extremely cost-effective and I have seen great results.
However, it would be really nice to see the same experiment run whereby your promoted post and sponsored ads target your fan base and also contain the exact same message within the 140 character (or so) restriction.
Good points! We tried to keep our Promoted Post and Sponsored Story as similar as possible, but I see what you're saying with the copy being truncated. Also, for this test we didn't run the sponsored ad for only people who are fans of us already. It would be interesting to see the engagement metrics for both the promoted post and sponsored story if we targeted it to the exact same group, but I still think the promoted post would win out since it appears in the newsfeed and not in the facebook ads section.
So to take my curiosity a little farther, we'll start with "Facebook estimates that only 16% of a company's fans will see every post they generate in their news feed." As of now, SEOmoz has 43,645 likes on your Facebook page. This means that if SEOmoz were an average Facebook page with an average post, you could expect to gain exposure to 6,983 people. According to your screenshot, 116,276 saw your post. In other words, with a Promoted Post, you were able to reach 266% of your audience size.
Where I'm confused is where the campaign reach of 26,275 from the Promoted Post came from? Wouldn't the total people who saw your post be the campaign reach (which would highly change your CTR)? Just wondering, feel free to correct me if I'm way off.
In am also confused about - How does FB calculate the "views" on a timeline? depending on ones screen size one needs to click a link below a finite no.of. stories so that more stories will load on his/her timeline. However, how does FB know that a specific post is actually viewed?
Hi David,
In this situation the stats linked to the post were a combination of fans and non-fans. If an advertiser only targeted their existing fans then it would be an accurate reflection of the reach of this post to your current fan base.
However, about 2 or 3 weeks ago Facebook started merging in the reach figures of a post for the combined ad mediums. This meant that if you were using a promoted post to fans and also using a sponsored story to non-fans the overall figures were merged together.
It was a really frustrating change by FB as it removed your ability to view the percentage of your fans that you reached through a paid option when you were running promoted posts and sponsored ads on the same specific post.
Hey David, BFRL helped explain this some in his reply. Also, the 116,276 people who saw the post also includes people who saw it organically and through social reach (their friends liked the post so then it showed up in their newsfeed). This is a much larger audience than the fans of our page who saw the promoted post in their newsfeed.
Not sure, but maybe you're confusing the two separate entities here, David - the Sponsored Story and Promoted Post. According to the article:
"the Promoted Post ...had a reach of 26,275."
"For the Sponsored Story ... The actual reach of the campaign was 44,247"
Maybe I'm confused now, but I don't see where you're getting 116,276 views from. I see a totalreach of 70,522 from the combined campaigns (26,275 + 44,247 = 70,522). So again, unless I'm confused here which is very possible, they reached about 60% of their fan base with their Promoted Post and an additional 44k with the Sponsored Story ad.
Now I have a question - Could the Sponsored Story been viewed by some of the fan base that is already seeing the Promoted Post? And, if so, does that count as 2 "reaches"?
Thanks for the interesting study.
Hey Chase! The 116,276 is in the screenshot of the promoted post. It was the total number of people that saw the post on our brand page. Keep in mind that the 70,522 was paid traffic (either sponsored story or promoted post) and the rest was either organic traffic (visitors just coming to our brand page and seeing the post) or referral visits (visitors who's friends had liked or commented on our post so the post appeared in their newsfeed).
Hope that helps clear up some of the confusion.
Ohhh, there it is. I knew I was missing something. Thanks lol.
Btw - are there any numbers for overlapping views of the 2 ads? I mean, in the case where someone a visitor views both the Sponsored Story and Promoted Post.
Unfortunately, FB doesn't give us insight in to those metrics yet. Hopefully they will expand on that moving forward!
Interesting post, Justin. Facebook is definitely a tricky animal when it comes to calculating true ROI on paid advertising. I agree with bfrl's statement about 'comparing apples and oranges'. The post you chose to promote is for a superb free product that would be useful to 95% of SEOmoz's followers. So I think this post would naturally receive a high engagement rate with people who are already fans.
I'm not debating the spectacular reach of the promoted post; I would merely like to point out that this post may have received the highest engagement rate even if it hadn't been promoted. And since SEOmoz's Facebook fanbase continues to steadily grow, each successive post would have a slightly higher potential reach than the previous one.
It's too bad there isn't a way to split test a promoted post vs. a regular one to establish the exact amount of additional engagement that can be attributed to paid sponsorship. But this was an insightful post nonetheless.
Hey Jason...definitely valid points. We actually posted about our updated Beginner's Guide to SEO back on May 23rd when we first updated it. We didn't promote it or run any sponsored story for it.
That post was seen by 16,926 people, had 139 likes, 17 comments and 40 shares. So, you can see that even though it was a pretty popular post, it was no where near what we saw on the post when we ran the promoted post and sponsored story.
Hi Justin Really, an effective post.
As we seen in Facebook if our close friend is like or share any content or post then it became more attractive for us. same as the sponsored stories come into sight for friends of fans. There is an added level of relevance and became amazingly effective.
+1 for this post
Thanks
Thanks Dhali!
I was wondering if anyone has experienced the "promoted post phenomenon," where your promoted post, (supposedly targeting your friends and their friends), comes up primarily with other nationalities liking your post.
My businesses is a local US business, and when I dug into the promoted post analytics in the facebook ads admin section. I noticed that the targeting was very broad...in countries like Pakistan, for instance. Can anyone explain this? Does this mean we have targeting capabilities in the promoted post? Meaning, do i write the copy, set the budget, let it go live and then hurry up and get into the admin section so that I can then adjust the preset targeting options? Or is facebook fudging the numbers by widening the reach to an irrelevant audience?
I would be very interested to hear if anyone else has experienced this.
Thanks
We experienced the same issue as tambotom, we decided to do a promote a post to reach some of our inactive fans newsfeed after reading your article and ended up with a slew of new fans from other countries as well as spammers and more. The post we promoted happens to be for a sweeps which clearly states that the sweeps is for US only on the app graphics themselves and in the rules, but it's not stopping all of these people from foreign countries signing up or from liking the page and also causing an increase in spammers on our post. How did this happen as we typically try to block fans from other countries as we don't ship our products to other countries. We can't limit our page to just the US within the settings because it conflicts with the northsocial apps we use on our page. I'm just really at a loss of why promoted posts did this and why the reach was foreign when the majority of our fans are not?
Remember, "Promoted posts are available to Pages with 400 to 100,000 likes" .. so for those with over 100k fans, the only option is Sponsored Stories.
Do you know what the logic is to capping it at 100,000?
Good point seorock. I forgot to mention that in my post.
Great post on the difference, but I really do wish Facebook would abolish EdgeRank altogether. Fans should see all posts in a firehose approach the same as Twitter. If you are clogging the feed or not engaging the fans expect an unlike. It would reward pages that engage fans & allow advertising to be used to attract new fans not simply advertise to ones you've already acquired. RANT OVER.
100% agree!
So with the right settings in a sponsored story, does it have more potential than promoted posts?
Great Post Justin. We've been testing Promoted Posts since May as well and have seen similar successes - in terms of major increases in visibility on Facebook. Having a post promoted in the middle of the page vs. an ad on the right side certainly helps as well. Similar to a Google SERP, when your ad gets placed on the right side of the page, you notice a huge drop in CTR. What we haven't seen so far is a corresponding increase in clicks off Facebook to the client site . More visibility on Facebook has not translated into visibility off Facebook for us
I'd be interested as well to hear if anyone has tested posts with clear off-site calls-to-action. We are seeing so so results at best on that as well.
This is fantastic info. Since we are a local business is this program available to local businesses?
Thanks Justin_Vanning,
Thanks for your information i really like this post and i learnt with this post what is basically difference between these two strategy....
Glad you enjoyed it!
I'm really thinking to setup some sponsored stories, then do some promoted posts when we built a larger community around our Facebook page.
Good luck!
Hello
If you want to reach new audience and get some new people coming in then Sponsored Story isthe only option because Promoted Post just highlight your story to existing fans.
I am curious as to the cost per conversion metric as opposed to the cost per click. If I am spending money then I am looking for an ROI metric.
I don't know that comparing branding interaction differentiated by people who have already liked my page versus those who haven't is much help to me as a business owner. Why should I be paying for mores likes on posts from folks who already like my page? When I pay, I pay for conversions.
In this case study, I would be more interested as to the impact on SEOMoz's revenue, not their Facebook popularity.
Hey Jeff...good points. Obviously, for most business owners they want to drive sales when they are spending money. One thing to note is that we weren't just driving likes and engagement from current fans because every time a fan liked our Promoted Post, it showed up in their friends newsfeeds thus expanding the reach of the post.
I'll definitely be trying a more promotional offer/post in the future and seeing how much incremental lift we can see on conversions when utilizing the promoted post and sponsored story tools.
Awesome post! We can easily identify the value in the two strategies and the results. Great analysis and visual support.
Curious about the quality of paid post visibility. We have been experimenting with paid posts and have found many of the "likes" that we receive do not appear to be quality (in fact, some actually seem to be from fake accounts).
Curious what others may be experiencing.
Really interesting analysis between the two. Great to see someone do some research on the different numbers each generates. I think this definitely says a lot about dedicating time and money to your target market vs the entire market. Depending on the product/service/subject it may be more beneficial to just go after that specific group of people. I think one of the hardest things to decide as a company is if your product or service can be expanded to a larger group of people, or if you should concentrate on maxing out your specific market. Your numbers definitely show that when it comes to SEO, you had more success with people already interested in SEO- it may be different for other companies.
This is cool. Instead of me spending 100 bucks you did it for me. Thanks :D Jokes aside, I wish I had $100 to test this out but this gives a slight idea of the potential of such posts.
HELP! I've read this very interesting post, and most of the comments, but as a new user of FB ads, I'm having a hard time understanding the difference between 'Targetted Reach' & 'Potential Reach'. When I click on the data for both my Sponsored Stories ad & my Promoted Post ad, despite the 'Targetted Reach' of several thousands, my 'Potential Reach' shows as 20........ What am I missing?
I am using facebook ads as well and i am starting to like the sponsored promote post. Sponsored ads can get more likes to the facebook page for sure but promote page is a good way to get likes in one of your top posts!
Wow... we can clearly see the difference between two strategies and their outcome.
Thanks Justin for sharing this.
I need to know, how CPC of promoted stories is so less? Does it work on the same principle of Google Adwords's Quality Score or something else?
Hey Praveen...the cost was so much less because the promoted post audience engaged with the post on a much higher level than the sponsored story. Also the cost of the promoted post was much less than the sponsored story. When you do the calculations it means that each click we got from the promoted post ended up being really cheap.
I believe that the CPC was lower in the promoted post because he was targeting his own fans. In the sponsored story he was targeting a very competitive demographic of US, Canada, UK, or Australia Facebook users who like SEO related topics and websites. The CPC is determined by a bidding process if a lot of people are targeting the same demographics then the CPC is higher. To do an equal comparison he would have to do a sponsored story targeted at his own fans. CTR was higher with the promoted post because if you consider your fan base as a lead base those leads were familiar with the brand and in a sense qualified leads. However, the sponsored story's demographic or lead base has not been qualified. Campaign reach was lower with the promoted post because you are pushing out a status update to only the X number of Facebook fans on SEOmoz who were actually on Facebook at the time of the promotion.
What is also cool about promoted posts and I didn't see this until yesterday is that you can choose to do a promoted post to friends of fans, which I did in the last 24 hours and received a ton of clicks. So we'll see thanks for sharing your data. I enjoyed your post!
I have a question: In a promoted post that you are promoting to your fans why would FB show the number of people who saw this as more than your fan base? How are more people seeing this post than are on the page?
Because Facebook also targets the friends of your fans. The interaction your fans have on your Promoted Post (clicking Like or Sharing) shows up in their news feed. When their friends see it, it increases the reach count of the ad.
Spot on Rob!
Hi Rob-
Thanks for answering!
Do you think we could assume the following:
Total reach was broken down as:
26,275 Existing Fans (Promoted Post) +
44,247 People who are not fans of (Sponsored Story) +
45,754 Friends of existing fans (Promoted Post) =
116,276 total reach.
So do you think it's safe to say that if you use a promoted post with the friends of fans box checked this could not only be a more cost effective strategy for customer/fan acquisition than a sponsored story? It's crazy to me that the promoted post reached more people than it did the sponsored story! I would assume this is because of all of the potential mobile users?? What do you think?
Really interesting post about the paid post appearance, and sponsored story. this adds just like a Google ad but i think Google adword provides more reliable result than facebook Ads.
Hi Justin,
Quite confused about the difference here between a sponsored story and a page post ad.
While you state you are looking at sponsored stories, isn't this in fact a page post ad?
It was my understanding sponsored stories had to be liked your friends as per these:
https://ppcwithoutpity.com/facebook-ads-vs-sponsored-stories-vs-promoted-posts/ https://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/facebook-promoted-posts-page-post-ads-differences/11062012/
Any chance of clarifying this?
Thanks
I think that unless you have a decent fan base, Promoted Posts are not worth it. Here is where Sponsored Stories come in. They help you reach more people (campaign reach), and hopefully turn them into fans. Once you have a nice looking fan base, like SEOmoz does, then the Promoted Posts will do a great job in getting your message out to those people who are already interested in what you have to say.
In other words, it's not a PP vs SS thing, but more of a strategy thing. It has to be carefully planned, and deployed in the correct sequence in order to be effective.
thanks for posting this article i learn diference between two stratigies
One of the recent Facebook additions that makes this easier is the “people saw your post” text that appears under each post. It’s a good way of knowing which posts need extra promotion, and judging the best times to post content to get a good response for free. That way when you have budget you can allocate it on the weaker posts if they need a push.
For our campaigns sponsored stories have not worked very effectively and we found allocating the budget to promote the page itself was far more beneficial so that’s a possible 3rd use of the $100 to be considered.
Thanks for putting this together Justin, we will definitely be trying promoted posts soon.
Great Post! I have actually been trying to decide if the promoted post advertising is worth it, i think after reading your results i may give it a try!
Go for it! Let me know if you have any interesting results!
Interesting study. I never thought about it from this prospective.
Great post Justin. Given it a tweet for you as well!
We've started using promoted posts and have seen some excellent results that, like you, were previously unheard of figures. We've started promoting a few of our posts now, each on smaller budgets and whilst some perform well, others seem to 'flop'. We're having a look into the analytics and doing some testing ourselves, but would be interesting to know if anyone else experienced similar results.
Thanks Lewis! Glad you enjoyed it.
Thank you so much for sharing these metrics! I have had similar results on Facebook, with Promoted Posts generating a lot more interest and user engagement - I wonder if that is true because people tend to trust a Promoted Post more since they see someone from their Friends list 'endorsing' it...I tend to think that association makes all the difference.
The endorsement definitely helps! I also think people are more willing to engage with a promoted post since it is showing in their newsfeed verses the sponsored story which is on the right side where all the ads are.
Muito legal o teste! Obrigado por tirar essa dúvida!
I feel like Facebook users are trained to completely ignore the right side of the page because they know all that's over there is ads. So even if they see your logo most of the time they aren't really looking at it and aren't going to engage with it or remember it. When its in their news feed they can't help but read it, so even if you don't get a click or like you still get your name right in front of them in a more meaningful way.
I think a key point in that is "even if they see your logo most of the time they aren't really looking at it and aren't going to engage with it or remember it".
As a marketer I beg to differ, I think subliminally they will pick up on the logo if it's one they've seen before (bigger brands are easier to remember obviously). A logo is a very powerful object and people do remember them and what colours are associated with it.
I think on Sponsored Stories (right side ads) a high reach/low CTR is inevitable but I also think they will raise your brand awareness more than the Facebook analytic numbers can ever say.
Yeah I definitely agree to some extent on users ignoring the stuff in the right rail where all the ads are. We did however see a much higher CTR on our sponsored story than we've seen on regular FB ads that we've run. I think having all the engagement stats (likes, shares, comments) showing on the post definitely helped us.
Nice metrics !!! I have been involving in Facebook advertisement for over 2 years now !!! Easy to understand.
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed the post!
I've liked my results from promoted content. If I am going to spend the money on creating a killer spider piece then why wouldn't I spend a little money to help promote it? I've found the extra dollars well spent. Engagement is up and it is having a residual effect.
I find this interesting as I myself never get too much in to Facebook paid service as ROI in terms of conversions is very difficult to measure...
I think from the branding and audience engaging point of view this is an interesting stuff... One more thing that one can learn from it is how people react to Promoted Post in against of sponsored stories...
Good stuff!
Hi Justin
Great post mate .... But I am wondering since Promoted Posts targets existing fan ( who I would assume have seen the value offered in Beginner's Guide to SEO and would love to see what has been updated ) would have been a bit biased to the post as opposed to Sponsored Story where the target audience was a bit more broad and they might not be aware of the usefulness of a Beginner's Guide to SEO ( I would expect a fair percent of them might consider themselves with more experience in SEO where they might over look a Beginner's Guide ) ... thoughts ?
I would love to see this experiment for something more broad ..if anyone do try it out plz do give me a shout :)
Good points Saijo. I'll try a test like this sometime in the near future!
Dear Justin, This post is really very informative mate... this will help experts (social media ) how and what's the actual meaning about sponsored and adv. with facebook.
By the way I have a question is there any price different between? what I think it should be.
Thanks,
Manoj
This will really help people that no one actually cares to listen to.....!
Last Christmas I spent $100 each on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Ads. All ended up costing about the same CPC and none brought much traffic or significant inquiries. (I run an arts organization.) I found them basically useless and expensive. I have not tried promoted stories on Facebook, but have promoted three posts now for $10 each and was pleased with the sharing/traffic generated.
One thing that bugged me was that even though you select an amount, they will run it past that amount, or at least they did in one of them. I was charged $28 instead of the $10 I had selected.
I am not against Facebook making money off of our content, but am worried that they will move even further into a system where the Business Pages are forced to pay to be seen. Very few of our followers understand how to control what they see on their feed. At the same time, we could not have grown so quickly without Facebook, so if they keep their rates low enough for struggling artists to promote themselves now and then, it might be a decent trade off.
None of this is intuitive and I appreciate your efforts in making sense of all of the rapid changes on the web. I get your daily emails and learn from them. This is the first time I am commenting... :)
Welcome Rayela! Great first comment. You raise some good points that Facebook could go down the path of making brand pages pay to be seen by larger audiences. Hopefully they don't make it harder for brands to distribute content on FB. I know for us, it's important to just be putting high quality posts and content on our brand page so our fans trust us and want to engage with us. Some brands put a lot of spam on fb and it can certainly create a negative affect with fans.
I am also feeling the same thing in last few days. Too much sponsored stories on the right side and never clicked. It looks something over studded. Facebook should really control those ads. I liked the twitter's concept of promoted tweets and I am glad to see that promoted story concept working fine in this scenario. Last sentence is probably most important. This case could be different in different scenario. Actually the other post linked from here show the different scenario.
Definitely agree! Also, brands will probably have to be careful about overusing the promoted post feature. If they promote every post, you'll run the risk of causing some fans to stop following your brand if they think you are taking up too much real estate in their news feed.
I'm not wasting another red cent on Facebook ads
And your timing is amazing. I'm just setting some facebook advertising campaigns up and the info couldn't have come at a better time.
Props' to you sir!!
Awesome! Glad to hear that. Let me know if you have any interesting findings.