We've looked in some detail (>$1,000 ad spend) at Facebook advertising to promote some Facebook pages we've recently set up and I can comment somewhat intelligently on the results. To be clear this is a post on advertising pointing at Facebook pages. In other words, advertising to increase the number of likes on your page, presumably with the intent of marketing to those likes later on. Facebook also allows ads pointing at regular webpages off Facebook, and some, notably Fab.com, have reported considerable success with that.
In a nutshell, the overwhelming majority of the likes we received were useless, however which way we tried to target them, and we tried about a hundred different ads with different targeting combinations, imagery, etc. Useless means that although we succeeded in getting likes for a "reasonable" price - as cheap as $0.50 in some cases - those followers turned out to be almost completely disengaged.
What does a useless like look like? Typically it consisted of users who seem to be what I call "pathological likers". Checking their profiles indicates several thousand pages liked, at an average rate of 10-20 new pages per day. They seem to spend a good deal of time on Facebook clicking on stuff without really thinking about what they're doing.
This is compounded, I think, by the whole way in which Facebook page advertising works. Facebook simply shows your page ad with a like button below it, but no real indication of the consequences of pressing that like button. I'm led to think many of the people who liked our ads had no idea they were signing up for a stream of messages from our page in future - they probably just thought they were approving of the image in the ad, since the like button is directly below the image.
One could say "so what, you're still getting permission to market to them?", but their intentions do matter. Surprising people with marketing messages they didn't expect is hardly a good strategy - especially in Facebook where it's all too easy to do a "Hide All" on the messages in question. Even if people don't unlike your page (a relatively rare occurrence), likes are useless if people do that. Whether they were doing a hide all or not, engagement from pathological likers seems to be next to nil. As an ecommerce company we ultimately care about how many sales our likes result in, and after getting well over 1,000 likes from our advertising, and sending them marketing messages consistent with the pages' themes, our sales to them amount to a grand total of exactly zero.
Indeed, browsing through their profiles indicates that alot of those pathological likers seem to be unemployed or low-income individuals for the most part, which probably limits their buying power. Better educated people with more buying power might be more aware of the consequences of liking page ads and might be less likely to do so. Of course, if you're actually trying to sell stuff, it's the people with buying power that you do want. We tried adjusting our targeting criteria numerous times to fix this but whatever we tried there always seemed to be a number of pathological likers out there who descended upon our ads in droves, exhausting our ad spend budgets very fast indeed.
So we probably won't be buying much Facebook page ads anymore. Very disappointing. We'll be sticking with other forms of advertising like Google AdWords for now, but I'd be interested in hearing other real-life experiences on this.
(Update: check out my follow-up post on this also.)
In a nutshell, the overwhelming majority of the likes we received were useless, however which way we tried to target them, and we tried about a hundred different ads with different targeting combinations, imagery, etc. Useless means that although we succeeded in getting likes for a "reasonable" price - as cheap as $0.50 in some cases - those followers turned out to be almost completely disengaged.
What does a useless like look like? Typically it consisted of users who seem to be what I call "pathological likers". Checking their profiles indicates several thousand pages liked, at an average rate of 10-20 new pages per day. They seem to spend a good deal of time on Facebook clicking on stuff without really thinking about what they're doing.
This is compounded, I think, by the whole way in which Facebook page advertising works. Facebook simply shows your page ad with a like button below it, but no real indication of the consequences of pressing that like button. I'm led to think many of the people who liked our ads had no idea they were signing up for a stream of messages from our page in future - they probably just thought they were approving of the image in the ad, since the like button is directly below the image.
One could say "so what, you're still getting permission to market to them?", but their intentions do matter. Surprising people with marketing messages they didn't expect is hardly a good strategy - especially in Facebook where it's all too easy to do a "Hide All" on the messages in question. Even if people don't unlike your page (a relatively rare occurrence), likes are useless if people do that. Whether they were doing a hide all or not, engagement from pathological likers seems to be next to nil. As an ecommerce company we ultimately care about how many sales our likes result in, and after getting well over 1,000 likes from our advertising, and sending them marketing messages consistent with the pages' themes, our sales to them amount to a grand total of exactly zero.
Indeed, browsing through their profiles indicates that alot of those pathological likers seem to be unemployed or low-income individuals for the most part, which probably limits their buying power. Better educated people with more buying power might be more aware of the consequences of liking page ads and might be less likely to do so. Of course, if you're actually trying to sell stuff, it's the people with buying power that you do want. We tried adjusting our targeting criteria numerous times to fix this but whatever we tried there always seemed to be a number of pathological likers out there who descended upon our ads in droves, exhausting our ad spend budgets very fast indeed.
So we probably won't be buying much Facebook page ads anymore. Very disappointing. We'll be sticking with other forms of advertising like Google AdWords for now, but I'd be interested in hearing other real-life experiences on this.
(Update: check out my follow-up post on this also.)
A good one Alex! Since joining Facebook in March 2006, I have not bought a single item from advertisement on FB. Now Google is another story altogether.
ReplyDeleteTo me FB means killing some time, while Google equates to serious research.