On August 5, 2009, I began The Great Facebook Ad Experiment. Per my friend Andrew’s advice to try a Facebook ad, I combined some catchy text with our logo and launched a campaign to advertise the official Too Shy to Stop fan page.
I opted for CPM (pay every time my ad appears), and I set a budget of $1/day. Too Shy to Stop generates no money, but I wanted to spend a little to find out what would happen.
(Pictured at left: The command center)
The ad ran from August 5th-September 10th. I recently terminated the ad because I didn’t want to spend any more money. I also wanted to step back and see what the ad has done for me.
If you would like to see my ad report (loads as an HTML page), you can click here to view it. This report has not been modified in any way; it’s exactly what Facebook generated.
In total, I spent $36.59.
My ad ran for 37 days.
When I wrote the original ad experiment blog post on August 6th, the Too Shy to Stop fan page had 203 fans.
My ad appeared approximately 135,000 times.
My ad was clicked 177 times (That’s an overall click rate of .13%.).
Of those 177 clicks, 18 resulted in an action (became a fan).
During this ad campaign, I also promoted the fan page using Twitter, word-of-mouth, e-mail, and our kind-of-illegal Facebook profile page.
We generated 60 new fans. Of these new fans, 18 were won because of the ad.
Overall, free methods of marketing worked better than paid methods. However, we did attract 18 new readers who may otherwise have never heard of Too Shy to Stop.
Yo,
Congratulations on your first Facebook experiment! Ok, so it wasn’t that successful in terms of fans gained, but I wouldn’t say it was a failure either. If I offered you 18 people that were willing to be plugged in to your content on a regular basis, would you pay $2 per fan?
Also – a huge success is your click-through rate. Your click-through rate (.13%) was more than 4x the CPC industry standard (.03%), and that is awesome. 177 clicks is awesome!
So what I notice in your data is the huge dichotomy between your clicks and your fans gained. This doesn’t mean that your ad was ineffective. On the contrary, it means your ad was very good at gaining people’s interest and making them click to see what the heck your page was about. The problem you need to solve is: what made them NOT become a fan after clicking through to your page? They liked what they saw on your ad, but then after clicking through they didn’t think you were fan-worthy. If you can figure that out, you can get a much larger percentage of those 177 clicks. I think there is potential yet untapped. Good luck!
Thanks for the summary! I’m starting a low-budget group blog at my university, and I’ve been experimenting with FB ads as well. My CTR has been much lower than yours (maybe I’m just not good at making catchy ads or not targeting correctly), but in the few days I’ve been running the ad, we’ve gotten a few new fans.
In my case, I think those new fans are more valuable than the old ones due to the new connections that they could bring in. We are targeting the whole University, but so far, most of our fans are within the circle of friends that I have who started the site together.
My next experiment will be using a high-cost one day ad campaign vs. a drawn out, low-cost one.
I thought your experiment was interesting. I’d be interested to see what would happen if you repeated your experiment today (2011). I’ve had some experience with FB ads and sometimes I think they are reasonable other times not. I wish it were possible to save the target and apply it to multiple ads for better testing.
Tony