Facebook Ads - Not so Bad After All

Sometimes you have to learn when to admit you were wrong. So, sorry Facebook.

I always thought the Facebook advertising program was rubbish - a poorly conceived attempt to monetise your impressive site traffic retrospectively, and no substitute for the mighty Google Adwords.

This impression was reinforced by the focus groups we did amongst social networking users at the back end of last year, for the www.kent.co.uk project. After all when a teenager told me 'why do I want to see adverts for mortgages on Facebook - I'm only 14!', I kind of had to agree with him.

But I now stand corrected. We have just started running a PPC campaign on Facebook for, ironically enough, another social networking site and it really is working. CTR is low, but I'm not too worried because we've plenty of volume of impressions to work with, and our conversion rates are very nice indeed.

I also particularly like the targeting options when you create your campaign - you can target users by their ages, with nicely refined age breaks amongst younger users, and most importantly their town/city, within a chosen radius.

This opens up a whole world of opportunities for regional and local marketing for clients targeting a younger audience, especially as I've always found geo-targeting to be imperfect on Google Adwords. I suspect Facebook geo-targeting is going to be far more accurate, as its based on the data provided by users when they sign up, not on Google's best guess based on IP address.

Now, the advert manager interface isn't perfect. The help guide is sketchy to say the least, and its very much a single user application, without any easy ways to share access with colleagues. But it's still not as bad as Yahoo Search Marketing so I can live with that.

So to conclude, I have now realised that my negative judgment on Facebook ads in the past really wasn't Facebook's fault - it was down to those bozo advertisers using the program poorly and clumsily. Just like the majority of Adwords advertisers who do PPC badly.