Greed Between The Lines|Ambassador of Quan. Follow me on my journey.

I recently decided that I was going to venture into the area of the Facebook Ads.  It seemed like a reasonable place to test the waters.  From what I had read, CTR sucks, but clicks seemed to come pretty cheap.  It’s not hard to figure out why CTR sucks.  Your ads are getting shown to everyone, not people who are looking for something (like normal ppc).  People who are just looking at their profile to see if they have any new messages or whatever are being shown your ad.  They are not paying any attention to your ad, so you are getting impressions without clicks.

So anyway… I decided that I was going to give it a try.  I found a couple of offers that I thought would appeal to college-aged people (since that’s the bulk demographic for Facebook).  I made my image (another difference between Facebook Ads and search engine PPC), wrote my ad copy and submitted it.

My first attempt was for a site that has some freebies and paid surveys stuff.  This ad was DENIED by Facebook.  My best guess is that it was because the site had an ad for a place where you can play poker online (legally), and I believe Facebook frowns on the gambling thing.

Next I tried a cash advance offer.  It originally got denied as well.  I can’t remember exactly what I had as my ad copy, but it was denied because I guess the ad copy didn’t completely reflect the landing page.  Facebook seems to be strict on ad copy.  So I tweaked the ad copy and got it approved.

Right after that I did an offer for video games, and got it approved as well.

So after about 15 minutes, the offers both had around 10,000 impressions and only a few clicks (not surprising).  Then, the impressions stopped.  I checked it again 1/2 day later and nothing new.  They wanted me to up my bid close to $1.  Now, the reason I got into the Facebook thing was for CHEAP clicks.  I can pay $1 per click on Google!

A day or so later I did another new ad for a health store.  This time I implemented using keywords.  This reduced my potential audience from 18 million to about 300,000.  I had to leave after about 30 minutes, but at that time I was still getting impressions and some clicks.  My CTR for this was about .07, while my other ones that were quickly slowed down was around .03.  I don’t know what Facebook’s magic CTR number is, but I’m sure that’s why the impressions halted on my other ads.

One upside is that it is very easy to start a campaign with Facebook.  It takes almost no time at all, so it’s not really a big deal when you stop getting impressions.  You don’t lose any money because you aren’t paying for clicks.  All you lose is the time you spent making the ad.

I’m going to continue messing with Facebook.  Like I said, it takes almost no time to put up an ad, and there’s really no downside to it.  You can at least see if anyone is interested in your niche.