After enjoying a couple months on Twitter, I wanted to build a website powered by the Twitter API. That lead me to build the TwitrContest.com site which is a platform to host Twitter Contests. I wanted this to be a turn key option for people down the road who want to promote a viral contest on Twitter.

So once I built the Twitter Contest website I wanted to get a contest up on it ASAP to demonstrate it and work out the kinks! I quickly threw a contest together to promote this blog, and my Twitter account. I decided to give away a couple hundred bucks worth of goodies; an iPod Nano, and 2 iTunes Gift Cards, this way I had three prizes and 3 winners.

I started the contest and began promoting it with tweets on Twitter, and a post on this blog. A couple weeks into it, when it was almost done, I remembered about FaceBook CPC ads, and how I had been dying to test them out. Here I go, with less than a week to go, I race out this following simple FaceBook ad campaign.

The Ad Unit

My ad was probably not the greatest, I did the graphic part in photoshop nice & quick but the graphic part of the ad is not great. The headline and body copy was also done in a flash & not A/B tested over time to optimize. It was a rush job, remember! Here are the details of the Facebook ad unit:

Ad Title (Headline) 25 Characters
Ad Image 110×80 pixels
Ad Body 135 Characters

So after looking at the ad I deployed, and how it was untested copy, you already know about the ugly part of my campaign…my ad was not as good as it could have been.

Campaign Results

This 4 day long campaign turned out doing the following:

1.96 million Impressions
591 Clicks (0.03 % CTR)
$0.04 Avg CPC
$0.01 Avg CPM
$23.02 TOTAL SPENT
Detailed results of this campaign.

Now the obvious things that pop out here are the near free impressions I got. Because virtually no one clicked on my ad (note the .03 % click thru rate), and at Facebook you only pay for clicks or visitors, you get all those impressions free. In just 4 days my ad was displayed nearly 2 million times at a CPM of a penny! That’s beyond good, and way cheaper than most big brand sites will give a small ad buyer. What this means is that anyone who needs to do branding, or other campaigns that benefit from cheap impressions should consider FaceBook ads.

I got an extra 591 people over to the contest site for just $23 so overall it was a successful campaign. I haven’t been able to get good four cent targeted traffic since 1999, so on a per click basis I was happy with what we paid. I certainly want to try another campaign as these CPC rates are well below top search engine CPC rates.

Segmentation Details

Here are the detailed results of this campaign. When you see this you will see the breakdown across different segmentation groups. I ran ads in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, and Sweden. As you can see in the details though, the vast majority of my impressions and clicks came from non-USA ads (over 1.5 million of the 1.9 million impressions came from just Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand). This is probably due to Facebook displaying ads in an auction format, and my bids were too low for some countries, and high enough in other countries. If you bid adequately your ads will display a lot, and if you underbid you hardly get any ad impressions.

With a couple days of results to look at I upped my bids in the US, UK, and Canada, ultimately I would see it was still not enough to make a difference. I must have been underbidding too much, it would be good if Facebook told you what you would have to bid to get more traffic (similar to how the search engines encourage you to spend more by sharing data).

Its too bad that the performance of an ad is not real time. Results in Facebook ad campaigns are very slow to update, and so improving a campaign takes longer than it would if real time reports were available. Even after my first update and upping of my CPC bids, hardly any ads got displayed in the USA, UK, and Canada. The campaign was not active long enough for me to see how much I would have had to pay to get good impressions on the US site. I am curious as to what CPC you need to pay in the US to get your ads in heavy rotation here, if anyone knows from their own campaigns please share with us in the comments.

Facebook allows ad targeting by segmenting their audience for you. I selected a handful of big countries in addition to the US. I then further refined down the total audience to older people, over 27, to get more mature people who are likely to read blogs on Internet Marketing. We did not do any male/female selects, or further segmentation that is available because our offer was for the wide audience.

Targeting on Facebook represents a real opportunity to the niche advertiser. You can select USA>San Antonio, Texas>Women Only>Over 27 years old (for example) and drill down to your optimal demographic. Of course this gets you less visibility than you would get with the wider audience, but it focuses your ad spend on extremely qualified prospects you get to define.

Motivation of FaceBook Users

I was not surprised to have a low CTR with this campaign, I mean I don’t ever click on FB ads so it isn’t that much a shock that no one else does, compared with search engine PPC campaigns. The CTR was lower than I expected, but it could be improved with tested copy and better graphics for sure.

The thing that did surprise me though was how poorly my FaceBook visitors converted to contest entrants (a 2 form-field form to enter). Here is a demo version of the contest landing page. I thought the ad unit adequately prepped (or qualified) a visitor for what was to come, but the conversion rates of that traffic on the contest page was lower when compared with visitors from other sources.

In general, our Twitter based traffic at the Twitter Contest site converted (by entering the contest) several times better than FaceBook based traffic. Granted this topic is a little less scientific, and with a small data sample, but it was also obvious. We had days with 100+ Facebook visitors to the contest site where not one entered the contest! Our Twitter based traffic was converting at just over 20%.

So in this case, my FaceBook based traffic converted much worse than our Twitter based traffic. I really want to test this again soon in another campaign to further look at this discrepancy. I’d like to also throw in a Google PPC campaign on my next try, and compare the conversion rates of all 3 groups of users (Google PPC, Twitter, and Facebook). So far though I found the FaceBook visitors to be highly unmotivated to convert, other things equal.

Overall Summary

The cheap impressions and visitors were great, but my own rush to get the campaign out, and the slow speed for data to come back from Facebook prevented me from ever optimizing the campaign to get the most out of it. I am sure a well planned campaign that runs longer would be able to do much better, and I plan on doing another one soon that I will be more careful with.

Facebook’s super low CPM rate makes it appealing for anyone with a branding campaign. Their big international audience is also easily within reach for the small advertiser. Their targeting or segmenting options appear to be really powerful too.

I am overall impressed with Facebook ads and eager to try out my next couple campaigns. Help me out in the comments if you have any tips, feedback, or if you want to share about your Facebook advertising experience.