Fix your ads, Facebook!

I’ve been dabbling with Facebook ads of late. I’ve been running some ads for my own small business – I like to test things out thoroughly (and learn from any mistakes) before I advise/recommend Reseo clients on a certain course of action. It can save a lot of red faced embarrassment.

Facebook ads are amazingly powerful in some ways and really (really) annoying in others. There’s so much potential in there, but Facebook has a long way to go before I’ll take it seriously (or recommend it as an advertising platform).

Here’s the thing (and I may be wrong here – it happens on occasion), but perhaps for the first time in history, online social media advertising allows advertisers to target their advertising on demography and interest.

You can target your Facebook ads directly at “Facebookers” who fit your target market. It’s scary, but Facebook probably knows more about you and your interests than your own mother! And they use that information to help advertisers like me target you.

Here’s an example showing how you can target your ads to your “perfect” customer profile:

The combinations are unlimited!

So far so good.

Where Facebook ads fall down is the reporting on conversions and ROI. Until they sort this out, steer clear.

Quick caveat, if you’ve configured your analytics properly, you can measure Facebook ad ROI, but you’d need to do a lot of manual work to measure how much you’re spending on Facebook clicks (or impressions) versus how much revenue you’re generating from those clicks.

It’s logical to compare Facebook ads to Google AdWords. If you’ve ever spent any time setting up and using conversion tracking in Google AdWords you’ll know how powerful that can be.

Here are the results from my three day Facebook advertising experiment.

There’s a nice pretty graph, lots of impressions, abysmal click through rates (but that might have something more to do with the quality of my ad!), and a total spend of $US25.38.

The problem/question I have is how many sales did I make from the clicks (or spend)? Google AdWords tells me this sort of information almost instantly, but Facebook ads do not. Quite simply, Facebook ads don’t offer conversion tracking, so I have no idea; I’m flying around in the dark.

I can’t recommend it as a serious advertising option until they do.

Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.