Facebook’s Weak Advertising Platform
Thinking about advertising on Facebook.com? You may want to think again.
To preface this post, I love facebook, have plenty of friends, and access it on my computer at work and home, and regularly on my iPhone. Being involved with Search Engine Marketing for the past 3 years and kind of specializing in PPC. I must say I am less than impressed.
I just thought I should share what one weeks worth of data looks like from one of our clients whocanisue.com, their site focuses on educating the public on the validity of a legal claim, then after answering a few questions you are shown a list of local attorneys that can help you with your specific matter.
I’m feeling just a little bragadocious, about 8 weeks ago we took over all marketing for whocanisue.com. We just redesigned their website and launched it 3 weeks ago, run all of their traditional media campaigns (South FL) and all of their Search Engine Marketing. Whocanisue.com converts at an avg. of about 13% and closer to 18% in South Fl which is astonishing, so I’ll pat myself on the back for our team that has done a bang up job but now we’ll focus on why I have your attention, Facebook.com.
You want targeting? Sorry, not gonna happen, you can choose demographics but what really matters is the relevance to your ads and your service. Why can’t I target my ads to someone that just wrote in his/ her status that they got a DUI or just got in a car wreck? Don’t know, you’ll have to ask facebook.com. Oh wait, they don’t ever respond to any questions unless you email them 4 times regarding the same matter.
Now that I’ve had time to vent, lets look at the data taken from ONE WEEK of traffic, via Google Analytics:
Analytics Visits - Facebook.com (click to view full size)
In this time period facebook.com advertising accounted for over 10% of our traffic, yet Avg. Pages/Visit, Time on Site, and Bounce rate were staggeringly AWFUL against our site average for each metric discussed. Before I continue, let’s check out conversions:
Analytics Conversions for Facebook.com (click to view full size)
Again, for the same time period. The traffic that Facebook.com barely converted and against our site avg. and top traffic sources there was no competetion.
Thoughts: Facebook should try displaying ads based on relevancy. I don’t know, maybe use the rich content you have available from your users. Ultimately, someone advertising in the age of tracking and measurability will most definitely appropriate their ad spend to the medium or mediums that convert at the highest rate and for the lowest cost and unfortunately for facebook, we had to pull our ad spend.
