There has been a lot of bad press lately about Facebook advertising performance. The critics cite different ad-buys and related conversion to paying customers and because the numbers are low they say Facebook advertising is a farce. It’s never considered in these articles that the marketers might not know what they’re doing.
We do a fair bit of advertising on Facebook (as high as $1,500/ month) as a part of our test kitchen. We do per diem work for non-profits and have other websites we manage. This work gives us a platform to test marketing strategies and identify the best practices around measurement and reporting for online marketing.
We did a lot of split testing, using a variety of Facebook’s ad types and targeting tools. We found that some things worked very well and some things did not. Here are some of our stats back in June 2012:
- Direct CPC Ad to Website Purchase Page = 0.88% Conversion
- Ad Promoting Fan Page w/ Fan Page Promoting Website Root URL = 2.39%
So… when we advertise a product directly we see conversion rates just below 1%. Not bad… A bad campaign should do 0.5% at a minimum if you get the targeting and message to market match right so 1% is a good starting point.
However, we increased this conversion by 172% to 2.39% when we use Facebook ads to promote our fan page (in this example facebook.com/genealogybeginner) and then allow fans, on their own, to visit our website and make the choice to sign-up. It’s because we gave them an experience.
Experiential marketing isn’t direct response marketing. It’s an opportunity to show consumers you have something to share and can enrich their lives. They then build trust, see the solution on their own, and take the initiative to join your family. They do so because they want to, not because you’ve convinced them to.
Photo Ref: http://flic.kr/p/9GUeg6