by Maria Luci
Every month, we post ads on popular websites. Past ads have been on sites like Feature Shoot, LinkedIn, Ads of the World and Creative Review—all of which were successful in different ways. For January, I decided to try something new—it is a new year after all! So I did a bit of research and decided to try out Facebook Advertising. Facebook for Business boasts an audience of 1 billion people, and says they’ll, “help you reach the right ones.” Their advertising engine allows you to target ads so specifically, that one could show ads to people who work at certain companies, while also focusing in on gender, age, and even marital status. For example, if I wanted to, I could target Wonderful Machine ads to 25 year-old married women who work at Ogilvy & Mather, live in the United Kingdom, and enjoy cooking.
Now for Wonderful Machine’s purposes, I didn’t need to get that specific. I did however, create several advertisements promoting our photographers. I then set them to be shown to those working at ad agencies around the world like TBWA, Wieden+Kennedy, Digitas and so forth. In total, this brought my audience to 25,780 people.
Example of one of our Facebook ads
I then let the ads run and sat back and waited. After a few days, I reviewed our stats, and while the ads had been seen by a good group of my audience, very few people seemed to be clicking on them. I chocked it up to either creatives not wanting to “work” while on Facebook, or that people just don’t pay attention to Facebook ads. Who knows? Either way, I gave up after two weeks of low click rates (only 9 to be exact!) and headed back over to one of my go-to places to advertise: Google Adwords.
Example of Google search results ad.
Luckily, my old pal Google helped us out, and through targeted keywords (like food photography, corporate photographers, Knoxville photographers, etc.) brought 10,580 clicks to Wonderful Machine, and were shown 2,186,993 times. Not only that, but the cost per click (CPC) was very low, with an average of $0.04 a click.
What’s your experience been with web advertising? Have you tried it? Have you had luck with Google, Facebook, or some other source? Let us know in the comments!
Need help with your social media? Reach out.