- Facebook ad example
- 2010-01-04: Marketing by numbers: I placed a Facebook ad for a client to promote their Facebook Page about one of their products which, interestingly, ranks higher than their product page on their website.
- Back on the 27 September they had 5 fans and now they have 32. The ad cost £74 for over half a million displays (impressions), 208 click throughs and those extra 27 fans (if all came from the ad) so costing £2.74 per new fan. I didn't optimise the ad, it was just a quick, cheap test. The client pulled the idea before we'd made enough to test the numbers. Ideally I'd want more like 200 new fans before we could say whether it's worth working on or not.
- People who visit my client's website from this Facebook page are converting into enquiries at a rate of 10%. The volume's not there, but that's a good rate.
- We've had interaction on that Facebook Page. And those 208 people who saw what we do and over half a million people who possibly saw our ad, they must count for something in the same way as you think when you place an ad in a magazine about the circulation. Even a classified ad in a 500,000 circulation magazine would cost more than £74.
- I doubt ads that cost ten or a hundred times as much get subjected to this much scrutiny. I know there's always pressure to tie marketing spend to results, that was there even back when I started in 1981, but it sometimes feels like those systems that can be measured by their results aren't given their due. They are quickly and easily dismissed by the results they willingly show. Whereas a magazine ad .. "ah, well, you can't measure the results, but look how many people we reached with our message".
- For my money, if you can measure the results in this detail, you have a fighting chance of making it work because you can improve it, see the difference, and keep improving until it's profitable, then keep improving until it's very profitable while starting other ads and campaigns using the income stream you've generated.
- There was always the rule about magazine ads that says someone has to see your ad nine times before they buy, and they only see one in three ads in a magazine. Ergo you have to print the same ad in the same magazine twenty seven times (over two years in a monthly) before you can begin to measure the results. I don't know if anyone thinks that way any more. But I certainly think that if you put a marketing activity in motion, part of the benefit is what you learn from the results. If you plant an apple tree, then change your mind and want a lawn so cut your tree down before it fruits, the fault isn't in the apple tree, it's in your approach.
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