Facebook Ads - The new PPC Mecca?

November 9th, 2007, 6:17 pm Michael PPC, Internet Marketing

So I have to admit I never had a facebook account for social reasons. Not even to check it out when it began allowing non edu addresses to join - not for any other reason then I already had (and still have) a MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn & a handleful of other social networking sites. I kinda looked at it like being another MySpace with a little pep of web 2.0 .

Thats until they launched FlyersPro, which I was in love with. When I first discovered that I was able to use it to drive a good amount of traffic (not crap traffic, targeted traffic) to some sites for my company, I was hooked. It turned out to have a pretty good ROI - the downfall was $50.00 a day was the limit - PER ACCOUNT. So I had to split up my account for 2 ads each $25.00 a day. The downfall to that was accounting changes took 24 hours to happen & I couldn’t even create the new campaign and have it ready to launch the following day due to the fact I already had created a campaign that I gave the entire budget to.

Then this week Facebook launched “Facebooks Ads” (nifty right?) and did away with Flyers Pro. So I jumped on this quick as shit -stopped both my flyers pro ads and put everything into the new system. Went to deposit budget, with any major credit card except American Express (facebook does not accept it), tuned my CPC to a whopping $0.35 and my daily budget to $200.00 per ad, the leads I am trying to get usually fetch around $6.50 & up on key phrases for the top slots on google.

I then uploaded the Picture I wanted to use, Put in the bold headline & then the body of the ad. Yes, you heard it right I used a Picture a Headline & still had room for a few more catch phrases. Now take note google - this is still for $0.35 CPC.

Then I launched. Waited a few seconds and refreshed - 1000+ exposures. HOLY SHIT ITS REAL TIME. Refreshed again, 3400+ exposures & 2 Clicks - this can’t be right. So I checked the site, 2 refers from facebook. Refreshed again - 8,500 exposures & 7 Clicks - Checked the site again, I had 7 refers from facebook - 2 of which had already converted into leads. 1 qualified and 1 unqualified. My 1 unqualified lead could pay for those 7 clicks and another 10. This was amazing. It kept going, I joked with Rose while I was telling her the results on messenger that I was the”King of Facebook” . By the days end I had gotten a total of 38 leads from facebook - I was very happy with spending under $25.00 to get results like this. It actually beat google for the day on ROI.

Day 2 things got weird - I guess the cat was out of the bag because my exposure and clicks dropped significantly from day one would have continued to drop majorly if I hadent upped the CPC to $0.89(Still Cheap). Saturday night turns out to be very popular for one of my ads so I look forward to pumping up the account and seeing what I can do with it. I will write back when I get more results. Also the day by day accounting still seems to be a bit buggy, one day my stats were fine the next day they were dropped into the lower hundred thousands only later that day to come back up to the 1 million exposures that they had. Maybe it was a bit of system glitch they were working on?

The only major downfall I see to this is it seems so far there is little or no customer support. There is no number to call, just a very general FAQ section. Granted it is a very simple system to setup but people are going to need some customer support here and there.

Overall the boys from facebook did good with this one - I have said it before and I will say it again, “That kid is one smart son-of-a-bitch!”

..send this around..