Facebook Ads: Don’t Waste Your Money
I’ve run PPC ads on Facebook before with a decent amount of success, but this time I thought I’d try CPM. Buying CPM ads can be a huge waste of time depending on ad location and site demographic, but Facebook has an interesting feature that lets you target people by age, location, sex, and interests. Targeting means that the ad will only display to a specific demographic that you choose. I wanted to test it by advertising this blog, so I targeted males over the age of 18 who had “making money” listed in their interests. Sounds pretty good, right? If people are interested in making money, they should be interested enough in this blog to click the ad. At least that’s what I thought.
I set a daily budget of $5 which would equal 20,000 impressions. I assumed since I was targeting the ad to show only to people who I knew would be interested, that CTR would be fairly high, around 10-20%. However, I logged in a few hours after starting the campaign to find that I had so far spent $2.31 for just under 10,000 impressions and had received 1 click for a CPC of $2.31 and a 0.01% CTR. $2.31 per click for a “making money” niche is ridiculously high and I canceled the ad immediately (Facebook gives you the ability to cancel ongoing campaigns at any time, which is nice). I think it’s obvious that this campaign was a huge waste of time.
If I were to run this ad again, I’d probably target “make money online” or “affiliate marketing” rather than just “making money.” However, it seems like Facebook CPM ads really are a waste of money, because the ad location isn’t that great and most people on Facebook are just there to look at their friends’ pictures and waste time, so ad blindness will be through the roof. If you are interested in advertising on Facebook, I’d recommend advertising affiliate offers with decent payouts that allow you to target a very specific niche. Targeting older users would also probably be better, as they may not be as familiar with Facebook and will in turn be more likely to click the ads.
Have you advertised on Facebook before? I’d like to hear about your experiences and how successful your campaigns were, so leave some comments!
Related posts:
- Facebook Polls: The Best Way to Do Market Research
- Avoid These Site Practices
- Myspace Ads >>>>>
- Stop the Facebook Spam!
- “User Upload” Sites
If you like this post, subscribe to SL, and feel free to share it using this button:
Loading ...
Well obviously. Didn’t you look at your CTR when you were running CPC ads on Facebook and work out CPM ads would fail?
Lol actually I didn’t, I just wanted to test it and I thought with more specific targeting, especially to the “make money” niche that it would be at least somewhat effective.
On the other hand, I’d definitely recommend Facebook PPC ads, I’d even go so far as to say they’re probably better than Adwords.
I’ve never tried face book, but I have a site I thought would appeal to the MySpace crowd, CheckAim.com , and I decided to buy some bulletins from people with 500k friends etc. The bulletin went out, and I added the person as a friend so I could check, and sure enough the bulletin went to over 500,000 people, and you might think wow, that should get a lot of clicks…… Not a single click, in fact, I think my site had less visitors that month then normal.
Teens and young adults who use the social networking sites have become blind to ads and clicking on things.
Yeah bulletin marketing is a waste of time, especially because most of the people with huge amounts of friends are just spammers and “add whores”, so no one pays attention to them.
I wrote a post about Myspace marketing which might help you. I’m also planning a new project that will be using Myspace and Facebook as its primary means of promotion, so once that gets going I’ll let you know how successful it is.
Hey SL, care to email me with a campain or 2 you have had success with on Facebook with PPC ads? I’m just getting started and my first try didnt see any conversions.
Also are you a male??
I’ll tell you right now, you need to have a very specific niche and you need to be selling a product, not promoting a site. I’ve had success with debt management as well as a dating ebook, scholarships, and an Iron Man BANS site. I wouldn’t recommend using any of these now though, as debt management is ultra saturated, dating and scholarships have been banned from Facebook, and Iron Man is already out and starting to get saturated, although you could still profit from it, just not as much.
Keep in mind that even though the Facebook crowd is mostly college students, you don’t have to find offers targeted at students. Facebook Ads allows you to target based on age, location, sex, and interests, so it really doesn’t matter who your product is targeted at, so long as it’s targeted at someone. In fact, I’d say it’s better not to target students unless you’re promoting CPA offers as most of them have no disposable income and are a lot less likely to buy random things, and they’re also less likely to be sucked into offers.
Hope this helps. What were you trying to advertise?
Hey SL, I tried a few offers through Neverblue Ads. I tried one for a free scholarship. Basically user fills in some info for the conversion and they can win a free 10,000 dollar scholarship if they are one of the lucky chosen winners. Maybe I got in too late on it and didn’t target well.
Thanks for the info. You got me thinking about some future offers I could promote.
Yeah that’s probably what it was, or else your ad copy wasn’t very good, or your landing page didn’t match. Let me know how it works for you in the future.
you are right about that. facebook PPC is indeed waste of money. SHEESH!
I remember using the CPM “flyers” years ago. It wasn’t a bad deal if you were advertising something school-wide that was specific to the school students at one specific school.
It was more of a branding opportunity though. If you are looking for click-throughs, good luck, cause you’ll need it!
Here another way to make money
Kiqlo
You register, You Upload, You sell your digital content and the best thing is that is Free
Try it.