Facebook Ads

American Express ran a promotion through a Facebook page called Small Business Saturday. Given that I am into the whole small business market, I participated. Granted they were looking more for retail type small businesses not public accountants, but what the heck it was free and I really did not expect to get any new clients from it. My expectations were right on target, but I did get a $50 advertising credit for Facebook Ads.

I have been hesitant to do a lot of advertising on Facebook, because I am not sure it is where I am going to get leads on new business.  Most of my new business comes in during December-January or March-April. Surprisingly I also get inquiries around September-October from the real procrastinators.

Facebooks ads work much like Google ads, you quote what you are willing to pay for every time someone clicks on your ad. A click should take the potential customer to your website or to a page that promotes your business and/or product. Maybe you have seen the term PPC (pay per click) or CPA (Cost Per Action).

That is how most internet advertising is sold.  Shopping for a new CPA is not like shopping for a new toaster. I am usually willing to pay more per click, because I don't typically get a lot of clicks in any one day.  I have run Google Ads and some other PPC services before and actually landed a few new clients from the efforts.  December is a good month for me to advertise, so I created a Facebook Ad, applied the credit from American Express and set it to start running.

My experience with the other advertising told me that $50 should last me about a month, based on the typical click through rate I get advertising CPA services.  Now I have learned a little about marketing, but in no way am I an advertising guru, so imagine my surprise when my new ad generated 15 clicks in the first day.  I even went to my web site to verify that there really were 15 inbound hits from the ad.  Right there they were!  Of course at $1.51 per click, I had used up almost 1/2 of my budget.

The following day I got another 12 clicks and by the time I turned the ad off on day 3 I had spent my $50 credit and another $12 of real money.

I can't say there is definitely something fishy going on, but here are the facts:

1.  Using Facebooks ads, I got as many hits to my landing page as any other PPC service provided in a month.
2.  None of the hits lasted for any length of time, which is unusual if you are truly shopping for a CPA.  If someone is really looking for a CPA, they tend to spend some time researching you before they make contact.
3.  Speaking of contact, I got a grand total of zero actual contacts from the Facebooks referrals.  On every other service $50 of ads and 30 something clicks results in at least one or two actual contacts. 
4.  My geographic reach was more limited on Facebook than it has been on any other ad service.  My ad was supposed to be presented only to people within 25 miles of my office.

 Beyond the conspiracy theory that Facebook has a room full of folks clicking on ads to generate revenue, I realize that it could very well just be the quality or value of clicks I get for my services is much lower on Facebook than it is for other PPC ads.  Ten clicks a day is a great response rate from an ad for me, but it is the ultimate conversion action that you are really paying for.  So if my response rate is an equivalently lower ratio, then it really does me no good to get all those folks to my site or at least I am over-paying for clicks.  Remember I am selling accounting services, so I expect a low click rate but higher conversion rate.

Ads on Facebooks is a fairly new thing, so I would love to hear your experiences, good or bad with the service, even if you are selling toasters.