facebook advertising

[pcpete]

You are getting a 50% click rate? That is not horrible at all. Most any advertising only does at best 5%.

I am getting a 50% lower click rate when trying what I thought was a more optimized audience as opposed to my already low click rate of the broadest possible audience(everyone in a 40-mile radius). I was maybe getting 1% now it is about half that.

 

[nlinecomputers]

That makes more sense. Welcome to the club. That's why FB advertising is worthless if you are trying to traditional hit. Facebook is a social network. It is for fun and silly or to rant and rave.

 

[Kerrya]

Good luck with that. I wouldn't expect many direct conversions from it. I assume you have other advertising in place to go with it or great SEO so that you are easy to find? I don't know anyone that would search Facebook for a service. That is what Google is for. But FB can build name recognition like Radio and TVs use to do. Which will put more weight on your name when they find you online.

Couldn’t agree more. Facebook = brand recognition, google and SEO = buyers.

Both are valuable in my opinion, but don’t expect direct measurable sales from Facebook advertising.

 

[nerd2u]

Ask yourself when have you ever gone to Facebook looking for recommendations on something or looking for an ad for a service?

Sent from my SM-G870W using Tapatalk

 

[pcpete]

Ask yourself when have you ever gone to Facebook looking for recommendations on something or looking for an ad for a service?

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neither did or do people watch TV just so they can get ad advice, but TV can be effective. I don't disagree, AdWords or the yellowpages(in the past) are great for people who are ready to buy, but they are not the only effective advertising.

 

[pcpete]

I just found an option that can target people who own are using OSX. That might be effective. it was only like 16,000 people instead of the general population of 300,000. So I can keep advertising to them and keep us top of mind for a small amount of money.

 

[pcpete]

When targeting mac only, I am getting a much lower number. This could be partially due to using the same ad which was already shown earlier. Even a lower click rate does not mean I am not staying top of mind with these people, it just means they do not want to click again on the ad. I am going to work on a couple of new blog posts(new different ads) and see how that goes.

 

[DataMedics]

I just can't imagine throwing $1,200 per month on PPC type advertising, not on Facebook or even google. I know a lot of people do this, and it can help drum up some clients in the short term. However, that same $1,200 (whether in $$ or time) invested into web development, content creation, SEO and link building will yield 15X more results over the next 5 years.

I haven't run a PPC ad in over 5 - 6 years. I decided organic SEO was the better bang for the buck, albeit a much slower one. Now nearly 100% of my business is coming from Google organic searches. I don't do any cold calling, advertisements, brochures, or any other form of advertising now because I don't have to.

 

[sapphirescales]

I just can't imagine throwing $1,200 per month on PPC type advertising, not on Facebook or even google. I know a lot of people do this, and it can help drum up some clients in the short term. However, that same $1,200 (whether in $$ or time) invested into web development, content creation, SEO and link building will yield 15X more results over the next 5 years.

I haven't run a PPC ad in over 5 - 6 years. I decided organic SEO was the better bang for the buck, albeit a much slower one. Now nearly 100% of my business is coming from Google organic searches. I don't do any cold calling, advertisements, brochures, or any other form of advertising now because I don't have to.

That's great...until Google changes their algorithm and completely destroys your business. It's not good to rely too much on any one source to get new clients. Case in point, if I didn't have a good organic and maps ranking in Google, I probably would have gone out of businesses (or at they very least had to let go of some employees) when Google banned computer repair keywords on AdWords. I also get a lot of business from Craigslist. I'm not as diversified as I'd like to be, but at least I'm not like some of my competitors who are REALLY hurting now that they can't advertise in Google anymore.

 

[seedubya]

Facebook advertising sucks because it's not DIRECT advertising. The only kind of advertising that really works well is the type of advertising that comes up when people are looking for YOU. Even an ad in the phone book is better than Facebook because people are actually LOOKING for your service when they look at your ad in the phone book. With Facebook it's just poke 'n hope. This is why Google banning computer repair ads should be against the law. Google needs to be reclassified as a public service because it's what EVERYONE uses to find information. Google banning stuff is akin to making certain books illegal. We don't live in China. Google shouldn't be able to pick and choose what businesses they allow to be found.

GOOGLE IS A PUBLICLY TRADED COMPANY, YOU COMMUNIST!! /s

All joking aside, I couldn't agree more. They have become a defacto monopoly in search so different standards need to be applied to their search and advertising products than to other parts of their business.

 

[DataMedics]

That's great...until Google changes their algorithm and completely destroys your business. It's not good to rely too much on any one source to get new clients. Case in point, if I didn't have a good organic and maps ranking in Google, I probably would have gone out of businesses (or at they very least had to let go of some employees) when Google banned computer repair keywords on AdWords. I also get a lot of business from Craigslist. I'm not as diversified as I'd like to be, but at least I'm not like some of my competitors who are REALLY hurting now that they can't advertise in Google anymore.

If you're spamming and doing black hat SEO, then sure, you'll easily get punished from google algorithm updates. But, if you keep it white hat, focus on quality links from relavent places and building quality content that people actually want to read, Google updates will only continue to make you rank higher. Most the people griping about algorithm updates are also horrible spammers and deserve to get their sites punished.

The worst I've seen was about a 30% drop in traffic from one update. But, the very next one a few months later drove up traffic to 50% higher than before it.

I get business from referrals and resellers too. Not to mention forums like this one where I connect with IT guys (where much of my business comes from ).

But, Google organic is the only real "advertising" I do. I could always fall back to PPC if I needed, but for now I'll keep dumping my budget into the organic and keep watching my traffic do this:



Just imagine having to PPC for this much traffic to a site:



I couldn't afford to pay for all those clicks, that's for sure.

 

[pcpete]

It is hard to say how well this is paying off. If we can break even in the short term I would call it a win. Then each of those new clients will come back and/or give us a referral which is just profit. Also, if People see our name in their feed and do not even click, they may unconsciously be more likely to use us when they do an actual search on google

We have two campaigns going now. One with an ad advertising Free evaluations and a second promoting a MacBook repair special. We have actually gotten one MacBook in response to the special(they have to mention it to get the deal), which if I get the logic board repaired, it is a $300 job(even with the discount of the special).

We have averaged about $1.20/click on the free eval ad and about $1.70 on the mac special ad. Today I spoke with a Facebook ad rep to see what they might suggest. He showed me how to make a lookalike audience based on the users who have clicked on our website. This has cut the audience down to about a 1/3 of our original size. We will see if our cost per landing goes down much.