Facebook Ads

[callthatgirl]

Lots of hype lately, lots of people learning it and wanting to offer it as a service. I found a FB group of all these newbie hyper ad folks, many are willing to do the ad for free for experience. This one group I found (named something completely different btw)...is all one guy's students pretty much. So they all take his class and need help getting experience. I'm all into helping a newbie learn and see what results I get.

To close, I'm not 100% sure I want to do a full on ad for CTG to the general Q public. I am thinking of targeting one or two industries, males between 40-65 years old. I know it's very particular but I think for what I need, this is a good effort anyway.

So the next I have is this, who is doing Ads on FB and are successful doing it? I know techs here for years have been saying it works. I honestly do NOT want to learn how to do them. It's something I would rather have someone else do.

Thoughts? and btw...thinking an ad on LinkedIn might be better for the industry, but I know the clients pretty good and honestly, not many are messing around on social media during the workday. More probable at night/weekends on FB.

 

[GTP]

Facebook adverts?
Tried it, hated it, moved on.
My target audience use "ad blockers" anyway.

 

[callthatgirl]

so all of those "suggested posts" get blocked with ad blockers? Like this?

 

[GTP]

No, I don't think so because they are in the timeline. The user has to block those manually. I'm talking about the ads that appear on the right hand side of the timeline.
I haven't used my Facebook page for two years so I'm not sure what changes Facebook have made to the way it all works.
I should fire it up again so I'm not talking through my hat! Lol

 

[callthatgirl]

I those are "Sponsored" vs "Suggested". I hope my new guy who is doing it for free knows the diff. lol. With the groups getting so insane, this is the only reason why I am considering doing some light ads now.

 

[Mike McCall]

I used a few posts as ads on FB awhile back. People did see it as predicted, but I can't tie any work to it. I did have one guy post a one word reply though..."Spam."

 

[ynotech]

I'm planning on running a simple ad soon. I just plan to do it myself and only budget around $20 to see what kind of views and responses I get.

 

[Diggs]

Have advertised on Facebook a few times. Demographics seemed good but results were poor/nothing.

 

[allanc]

Have advertised on Facebook a few times. Demographics seemed good but results were poor/nothing.

I tried a one week campaign a while back.
Not one phone call or Email

 

[lcoughey]

My question is, if I were to invest $1000 into an ad, which medium would get me the highest return? As I see it, unless you are selling widgets, advertising to those who are not actively seeking your product/service is wasted money that could be put to better use.

 

[labtech]

My question is, if I were to invest $1000 into an ad, which medium would get me the highest return? As I see it, unless you are selling widgets, advertising to those who are not actively seeking your product/service is wasted money that could be put to better use.

Luke has a good point.
To add, it is critical to understand the USER INTENT on social media.

What is the typical user intent when someone logs in Facebook? Typically, it is not to purchase, especially tech related product/services, but rather to get entertained with non-sense, news, gossip, social activities, online education, etc.

However, Facebook could be a good promotional channel for branding, bringing awareness, etc, especially given the granular targeting flexibility.

As other have mentioned, I also had little conversion success on Facebook.

 

[NYJimbo]

Before I closed my store I spent a few hundred on facebook ads. It was very exciting to see what they offered and how granular I could get in controlling who sees what. But for some reason the visits I was getting seemed to be from one or two very specific ethnic groups, usually in places outside of my county even though I set them to promote to people within things like 2 miles or 5 miles. You can do so many things to SUPPOSEDLY target and control everything but even when getting thousands of views locally we got almost no response. I got more from craigslist. Start out cheap, look at the options. Make sure to TEST your ads from a different device, possibly on a different network to see if they even show up. Many ads based on geo locale dont work. For instance if the person nextdoor to you has an IP from the next county or state and you limited it to people in your area, they wont see it. Likewise if they turned off the ability for their browser to send location tracking/identification might not even see your ad.

For example, go to http://www.ip2location.com/ with your computer. See your IP and the "City & Region". If they are not the same as where you really are then when you go to facebook you may not see ads you targetted locally.

I have a laptop here and one of my cell phones (not my burner phone, for you know, never mind....). My desktop shows the IP for one town over from where I am. My cell phone shows the IP for Brooklyn, two counties over. If I target ads, am I getting viewers based on the town they typed in when they registered or what their IP shows ? Also anyone who created an account from their job in Area #1 and is viewing it from home in Area #2, will they see your ad ?

I've asked FB about all of this and got different answers each time. Some of their online docs make you think targetting is based on user profiles and others based on users use habits and some based on info from browser cache or from IP resolution.

If I go to facebook with my desktop using wifi, I get a lot of "People you might know" that are heavily scoring as Indian. When I opened my account it was scoring mostly latino/hispanic. The weird thing is the change happened when I moved to an area with a very high Indian population. I made NO changes to my FB profile. So I have to believe the scoring is because they took the IP or WIFI GPS and graded it and found a high population of Indians and now they are "my friends" ( I do have Indian friends, but not ALL of these people).

Ads on Facebook are very tricky.

 

[GTP]

If we could all have the resources and know-how that Google has?
88 BILLION from targeted advertising last year alone.

www.entrepreneurship.com/secret-behind-googles-success/

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

If we could all have the resources and know-how that Google has?
88 BILLION from targeted advertising last year alone.

www.entrepreneurship.com/secret-behind-googles-success/

Well, when you make the rules and algorithms.......

 

[callthatgirl]

I'm crossing my fingers while saying this but I already rank well with my keywords in Google and YouTube. More is always good, but I'm willing to try something new. The guy I hired made a few good mockup ads, so we are fine tuning them and will do the trial or test, whatever they call it. It looks good so far. It's one of the "suggested posts" in the feeds, not on the side.

@NYJimbo My fan page was at one time just a regular FB page for me, then after I had 5000 real friends (thanks to early social media) I changed it to a fan page, and that was stupid, then they changed that to "public figure" or something too. I don't know, it was confusing to me. I found that people couldn't post on my wall, only I could. Then I had a rash of dirty talking sex fiends from India, which boosted my likes to over 10,000. Then FB removed about 900 fake accounts, so while I am still a favorite in India, I removed that country from viewing my page. Only limited countries can view my page.

@Slaters Kustum Machines the last algo change with Google actually helped me rank better. I was a bit worried, but now I am seeing more of my keywords posting on page 1. I almost look like an SEO maniac. Like I'm over doing it. One guy told me, "wow, you know your seo, you were ranked like four times in my search". I said "Yeah, that happened with the last algo change" I blamed my goodness on Google Knock on wood!

 

[DanF]

Tried ads, never got any calls from them. Lots of clicks with no results. Ended up with a couple of extra likes on the page, but I never get any interaction whatsoever (there's more chance you CTG like something rather than those people I got through advertising on FB)

 

[Diggs]

Our advertising on Google was more effective than FB. Still - The response from the dollars spent on Google was a poor investment but as has been previously mentioned there is some brand awareness happening that is hard to quantify.

 

[callthatgirl]

Ok, we go live tomorrow. I have to say my ad manager/designer did a great job. All the branding still is 100% me, we created an ad that is not "corporate" and it will/should attract just one industry between the age of 40-70. I love all the special things I learned about ads too. Either way, worth trying once. If this sucks, I will just move on to try something new. I think I'm doing it because I'm a bit bored to be honest. Same old crap everyday makes Lisa go cra cra.

 

[callthatgirl]

I will also ad, that I'm tempted to the same type of ad on LinkedIn. I think they are very similar now.

 

[GTP]

I will also ad,....

Lol.