Free (Ad) Lunch on FaceBook

I'm not sure why it took me so long to figure out that Facebook is a seething pool of KidPub's target audience. The site is aimed toward kid ages 8 to 15, and there certainly are a few of them on FaceBook. A blog post over at StartupNation prompted me to take a look at advertising opportunities on FaceBook.

Ads on FB are similar to Google Adwords. They are small, textual (though you can add an image) and appear in an ad bar at the right-hand side of the page. If you run Adwords campaings you can likely run the same ads on FB.

What is great about FB advertising is that they offer you the option of targeting a specific audience, and provide a rough estimate of how many users are in the particular set:


My target audience is kids 15 and under, and FB estimates about 2,000,000 users in that range.

Like Adwords, you can set daily spend limits, set the bid for either CPM or CTC ad types, and track progress. The first ad I placed has run for about 12 hours with 142,000 impressions and 64 clicks. Not a great ratio, but my cost-per-click is lower that on the Google ad network, and I hope that I'm reaching a higher concentration of my target audience. I'll post about conversion rates when I have some data.

Ah, the free lunch part. The StartupNation blog pointed out the value of advertising on FaceBook. I started doing a bit of resarch, and kept running acroos bloggers saying, "For goodness sake, don't spend YOUR money on ads...use coupons!"

Sure enough, a bit of Googling turned up lists of coupon codes to redeem at FaceBook for advertising. I spent about half an hour hunting and submitting, and ended up with $350 credit in my ad account. Coupns are used before your primary source of funding (a credit or debit account), so for a week or so I can play with ad styles, formats, and copy and see what works well, using FaceBook's money.