Don’t Bother With Facebook Ads
Was having a look at one of my client’s Google Analytics data and noticed they’d had a stab at using Facebook Ads. Here’s a snapshot of the data:
An average bounce rate of 79.38% is pretty appalling, not to mention an average 1.6 pages per visit and 51 second average visit length. Any half acceptable stat here comes straight from the client’s admin panel, so they don’t count. Taking these results out, we’re left with an 87.35% bounce rate and an average visit length of 15.6 seconds.
In Facebook Consistently The Worst Performing Website, click-through rates of around 0.04% (400 clicks per million impressions) have been repeatedly reported. Applying this to my client’s stats, their 291 visits would have been gained from about 72,750 impressions.
Maybe it’s the industry (finance) - I doubt this as there is so much negative press out there - but it’s more likely that Facebook is remarkably resilient to monetisation via adverts, much to Microsoft’s dismay.
3 Responses to “Don’t Bother With Facebook Ads”
1 Matt Davies 11 March 2008 @ 2:19 pm
I’ve heard poor reviews of the facebook ad system so far… apparently someone even heckled Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW a couple of weeks ago, shouting “BEACON SUCKS” during his keynote speech.
I reckon it’s just down to the “stumble” effect that says social traffic is mostly useless. People don’t go on Facebook to be sold to, or even persue a particular interest that might eventually lead to a sale of something - they’re really just there to kill time and talk crap. So while they might be (very) temporarily distracted by an ad, it’ll take more than that to turn them into buyers, as it’s much easier to just click “back” than fill out your details to buy something you didn’t really want in the first place.
Perhaps if they introduced a click-buy idea like Amazon? You’d upload your credit card details to Facebook (I wouldn’t, but I bet there’s plenty of suckers who would) and could impulse buy an advertised product within 2 clicks - one to view the product, another to buy it - before being taken back to Facebook.
No charge, Mark.
2 Neil 11 March 2008 @ 4:44 pm
Yo yo Matt, some good comments there. Also, I guess that there’s a lot more chance for success if using Facebook ads to offer things such as “download free mobile games”, “free desktop widgets” etc. Facebook’s demographic is heavily skewed towards 18-24yr olds, but I have not seen a similar bias towards Facebook Ad targeting.
3 Justin 1 August 2008 @ 4:12 pm
I have had some success with facebook ads. I think it depends on how you show ads. For instance someone that is targeting users on facebook in the finance industry is casting a large net. Lots of people there are interested in money but not the traffic they are looking for. But in my case I only had the ad show for those interested in metal cutting. Now I don’t get a lot of impressions or traffic but my conversions are in the realm of 5-7%. But also I don’t hardly pay anything cause of low impressions because the demographic is so small. I have found you have to be very specific on targeting interests.
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