Buying Facebook Ads

Advertising on Facebook is a tactic that has been suggested to me many times but I've had concerns. I've known for years that fake user profiles exist on Facebook as bots, and they are constantly loading and reloading pages as they send out spam. This is a problem for those who purchase Facebook Ads, because some of the fees Facebook collects are based on the number of impressions your ad generated. In fact, a recent BBC News article talks more about this problem. 

That said, I have had some friends who have used Facebook Ads to successfully generate a lot of sales, so I thought it was worth a small test of $20 to see how many clicks I might be able to acquire. I decided to test out the service using my recent project - Weekly Texas Jump, an online magazine for nerds. 

You can also narrow the audience the ad is displayed to down to geographical locations and interests. For example, my site Weekly Texas Jump is aimed at people in certain cities and wouldn't be of that much interest to people who don't live in the area. So this feature is very useful to me.

You can also target the Facebook ads to only display to users who have 'liked' a particular page or RSVPed for certain events. I ended up targeting users who 'liked' the pages of businesses associated with nerdom, like the San Japan anime convention and Ooples Anime Store.




I only ran the ad for two days because the outcome was less than desirable.

Fail

The ad was displayed a total of 49,125 times but I generated only 2 page 'likes' and a total of 26 people clicked on the ad. Maybe if I was selling a product that had a high conversion rate from the clicks, I'd have kept running the ads but all I was trying to do was build awareness of my new brand.

So my conclusion is that for purposes of building awareness of a brand, Facebook Ads are a poor marketing strategy. Most people ignore them.

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