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Does Facebook Advertising Work?

The minor battle of the morning today is about a post by Luke on the Reach Students blog. According to his experience, flyer ads campaigns on Facebook get an abysmally bad 0.04% clickthrough rate:

We’ve run four targeted campaigns this year using its flyer ads, and each time the results have been disappointing.

Our most recent campaign saw 1.4 million page impressions delivered at specific universities – and only a 0.04% clickthrough rate. Ouch.

Guess what – most users on Facebook don’t give a carp about your advertising. They are on facebook because of their friends, not because of your hyper-targeted advertising campaign. They are looking to hook up with the cute girl in the dorm next door, not with your product. If you get 0.04% clickthroughs, be happy.

This generation is great at ignoring your commercial messages. Get used to it.

John Furrier  of PodTech, on the other hand, says that things just need to evolve and that great Facebook ad campaigns still have to be born.

I, of course, have always been a bit sceptical about Facebook. I wonder if a great ad campaign on Facebook will be developed before all users have moved on to the next big thing.  

(and yes, I am aware of the irony of me saying this, given that I run advertising on this site – but hey, the host wants money after all)

All I am saying is Facebook clickthroughs are well below expectations.

Of course I don’t expect all Facebook users to abandon their inboxes and wall postings and buy my stuff NOW.

But I do expect maybe 0.4 to 1% to take a look, based on experiences elsewhere.

It’s merely a comment on comparitive clickthrough rates.

“This generation is great at ignoring your commercial messages. Get used to it.”

Yep, I do know that

By the way, you assume the flyers are “commercial” and for “products”. Two campaigns were non-commercial and one was a recruitment ad for beta testers.

I’ll probably post up the flyers for analysis at a later stage as there’s been a surprising interest.

Cheers,
Luke

Luke,

Interesting stuff. I think if even these non-commercial and beta test ads didn’t draw any attention, I wonder how bad things must be for other advertisers.

It would be really interesting to see the ads and get some more info on the demographics you were targeting.

Facebook advertising does work but you need to practice burning some money like google adwords. Find the target market and hit them.