PuddleDucks Blog

Since reading some posts a few months back on Damien’s Blog and the eWrite blog about Facebook Ads, we have recently tried them out for PuddleDucks. We were lucky enough to get the free $100 of advertising from the Visa Network Application. So I set up our Facebook ad on the 2nd October and off we went. I set the daily budget to $5.00 Here’s the ad we ran:

Setting Up:

It’s quick and easy to get going. I love the way you can select your demographic of the Facebook users you want to see the ad.  As most of our customers are mothers of kids, I tried to get this selection when setting up the ad. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t store any information on whether the member has kids or not. This is a pity. So I had to do my best to get as close to our ideal selection as possible. I did this by selecting women over 27 and under 50 – either married or in a relationship. It’s the best I could do – I hope this isn’t sexist or anything!! The only problem with this is I could never see the ad actually appear on a Facebook page as I don’t meet these criteria! 

Amount of Clicks:

We were getting between 8 and 12 clicks per day with an average of about 10. The click through rate was very low – it varied between 0.07% and 0.14%. For instance yesterday I got 12 clicks out of 9,019 impressions which is a CTR of 0.13%. By comparison, our Click through Rate for one of our Google Adwords campaigns was 2.45% for the last week. This difference is understandable – by its very nature the CTR for Facebook Ads will be a lot lower than for Google Adwords.

Cost:

I set the budget to $5.00 (€3.87) per day. And I originally set the cost per click to $0.60. After a few weeks I reduced the cost per click to $0.40 and then the number of clicks I got per day increased slightly. On most days we were only charged between $3 and $4.

Pages Viewed and Bounce Rate (data analysed from Google Analytics):

[For those unfamiliar, bounce rate is a measure of whether a visitor directed to a website moves from the initial landing page (usually the home page) or whether they “bounce out” of the website immediately back to the source webpage.] 

Facebook Ads compare quite favourably with Google Adwords. Visitors from Facebook Ads viewed an average of 3.72 pages and the Bounce Rate was 33%. The comparable figures for Google Adwords in the sample period was 5 pages per visitor and a 29.5% Bounce Rate. I am quite happy with Facebooks results here considering that visitors from Google Adwords are expressly looking for a product while the visitors from Facebook are clicking the ad they happen to notice while they were going about their normal Facebook activities.

Conversion to Sales:

For us, Facebook does not fare very well in getting many sale conversions directly from the Facebook Ad click. Our conversion rate was less than 1% whereas we are getting over 5% conversion to sales from Adwords. (according to Gloogle Analytics)

Conclusion:

I enjoyed trying out Facebook Ads for PuddleDucks. We got good traffic but the conversions to actual sales were quite poor. The future benefit of the Facebook Ad traffic is not tangible but I think it can show positive benefits for brand awareness and hopefully some of these visitors will come back, independently of Facebook and purchase at some time in the future. Now that we have used up our free $100 advertising I think I’ll pause it for a while and think of other ways we can use the Facebook Ads in the future. Maybe promote specific products (with clicks to specific landing pages), maybe do something for the Christmas market and maybe bring visitors to our Facebook fan page rather than the website home page. I’ll continue with Google Adwords as it always brings satisfactory sales. In the meantime I’d be interested in hearing of anyone else’s experience of using Facebook Ads to generate sales.

— Aedan