Is FaceBook Advertising Effective?

Earlier I wrote about implementing FaceBook advertising as a way to reach KidPub's young market. I'd dug up $350 in coupons for ad credit and spent about two weeks spending it, testing out different ad copy for click-through rates. Once the $350 in free ads was burned through I backed off to a budget of $150 per month, just to see if FaceBook could really bring qualified traffic to the site.

I'm advertising our publishing program on FaceBook...KidPub Press publishes books written by kids age 15 and younger. The goal is for a new viewer to download our publishing guide, a PDF that explains the program.

Here's a Google Analytics chart showing traffic from Facebook during and after the $350 campaign:



You can see that over the past 30 days we've received 614 referrals from Facebook. The $350 campaign ended about a third of the way through the period.

The ad with the best CTR sees about 65,000 impressions per day on FaceBook, with a CTR of roughly .05%. Because daily spending is capped we get around 25 click-throughs per day. Of the 25 visits, an average of 5, or 20%, download the publishing guide. We capture email addresses as part of the download process, so we are building the marketing list for KidPub Press at a steady 100 to 150 per month.

We're projecting that 1% or so of the folks who take the trouble to download our publishing guide will sign up for a publishing package; an optimistic number is 2 new book deals each month, which makes the FaceBook ads a good investment. We also will reach out specifically to FaceBook users who download the guide to talk to them about the ad in an effort to improve the effectiveness of our Facebook advertising. Our average cost per lead right now is about $1.

Would CPM advertising be more cost effective? Probably not for us. Our effective CPM (eCPM) on FaceBook right now is just under 7 cents. It's unlikely that we would be able to see ads served in a CPM campaign for a bid under 10 cents, and we'd likely need a bid in the 15 cent range to achieve the same number of click-throughs. I'm comfortable with an eCPM of 7 cents, especially considering the side benefit of brand recognition as 65,000 ads are served each day to my target audience.

Closing in on 100K!

Back in August, KidPub was ranked around 400,000 by both Compete and Quantcast. We targeted the 100,000 mark back in November when we started doing serious work on building traffic, mainly through SEO and grass-roots marketing. I just looked at today's Quantcast number...119,146. Last week was 127K or so. We're getting closer!

Once we hit the 100K mark the hard work begins...gettting KidPub into the top 50K web sites. I know there are ways to 'spoof' Alexa to get a high ranking, but Quantcast numbers don't lie, since they are directly measured.

We're not getting many conversions yet from the Facebook ads, but the exposure is helping a bit, I think. It's only been three or four days since the FB campaigns started...it needs more time before I can really analyze the results. We're still watching click-through rates on several ads to figure out which are the best performers.