Case study: Facebook Flyers part 2

A couple of days ago I blogged about my experience with Facebook Flyers - the pay-per-click advertising platform for Facebook.

Part 1 focused on what Facebook Flyers are, how to set them up and the details of the tests that I ran. In this post (part 2 of the series), I'm going to reveal the results of my test. Read on...

The results
Facebook provides limited reporting but it is enough to give you basic insight into how your ads are doing: impressions, clicks, CTR, average CPC and budget spent - all on a daily basis.

What was interesting in my tests was the way in which the flyers were served. Although they initially got some good coverage, they quickly started to lose visibility. Several times, I upped the maximum CPC and each time they got a boost of impressions.

The graph below shows the impressions each of the 3 flyer tests got.



After 11th October, I left the flyers to run themselves, with no changes. And as you can see, they are hardly being served at all now, even though they are all showing as active.

So what's going on here? Why isn't Facebook spending my budget in serving my Flyers? Perhaps since it's a cost per click model, they upweight Flyers that get good click through rates (CTR). Initially, my CTRs were terrible - the maximum CTR I got was on the 'Supersize your iPod' Flyer which received a CTR of 0.28% on October 9th.

The average CTRs for the 3 Flyers currently stands at:
Find your soulmate: 0.008%
Control your credit: 0.004%
Supersize your iPod: 0.138%

As you can see: abismal.

If you think about it, CTRs are bound to be lower on Facebook than something like Google Adwords. Google users are actively searching for something. Facebook users are keeping in touch with their friends. With this in mind, it follows on that Facebook users are less likely to respond to sales-led advertising. I included the 'Find your soulmate' Flyer since I thought that this would fit in with what Facebook users are doing - ie connecting with people. But as you can see, this didn't perform well at all.

Conclusions
The tests I ran were not exhaustive, but give an indication of the sort of response you can expect from Facebook Flyers. Although CPC is relatively cheap, CTRs are terrible since users aren't in the frame of mind for buying stuff (or even finding a date it seems!).

Despite this, I haven't written Facebook Flyers off. With a user base of 40 million people and 60 billion page impressions per month, the numbers are too big and the potential too great to pass up. So I'll be doing some more testing in the days and weeks to come. Of course, you'll hear about it here when I have any results.


The future
It seems the Flyers platform is set for a major overhaul. Nick O'Neill of AllFacebook reports that Facebook is expected to launch a new ad network on 6th November and have recently filed a trademark for "SocialAds".

They are clearly looking for a way to monetize those 60 billion page impressions per month to help justify their valuation! Watch this space.


If you've had any experiences with Facebook Flyers, let me know in the comments below.

Case study: Facebook Flyers part 1

The huge popularity of Facebook is unquestionable. It has overtaken MySpace as the largest social network in the UK - a fact that marketers are starting to wake up to. After all, where there are huge numbers of people, there are advertising opportunities and money to be made.

For a while now, Facebook has offered a targeted advertising solution called Facebook Flyers.

Anyone can create a flyer (ie an advertisement) and have it served to any segment of the Facebook membership based on geographical location, interests, gender, age and many other segmentation attributes, as shown in the screenshot below:



With pay per click advertising getting ever more expensive on the Google AdWords network, I thought I'd give Facebook Flyers a go.

The test ads
For my test, I set up 3 flyers for 3 different affiliate products, each with different targeting selections. The images below show both the flyers and the targeting:

If you are familiar with Google Adwords, there are a number of things that Facebook Flyers do differently.

Firstly, as you can immediately see, you can add an image to make your ad more visually appealing.

Secondly, the targeting options are better - since you are targeting actual Facebook members who have given Facebook lots of personal information (age, gender, interests, home city etc etc), Facebook allows you to use these to determine whether or not your flyer will be displayed. (Dean Donaldson discusses whether or not this is a good thing in his recent post Facebook plans to sell my garbage).

Setting up a flyer is a simple job. Each of the ads went to a dedicated affiliate landing page which, according to the affiliate network Commission Junction, converted well. I started off with pretty cheap maximum cost per click ($0.05 each) and a daily budget of around $10.

So within 10 minutes my 3 flyers were up and running and the impressions started ramping up.

The results
So how did they fare? Check back soon for the follow-up post on the full results, click-through rates and conclusions. Why not make life easy for yourself and subscribe to my feed so you'll get part 2 automatically?