Dicing into Facebook Ads

Written by Jessica Ong (contact - e-mail) -- November 6th, 2009 | Share - Save - E-mail

If you are an advertiser who wants to drive large volumes of traffic to your site, there are two important things you are probably looking for:  reach and ease of implementing your campaign.  Facebook meets these qualifications.  It is currently the third largest site online with 125MM visitors in September and it is quickly approaching parity with the #1 and #2 publishers, Google and Yahoo.

Google.com vs. Yahoo.com vs. Facebook.com Traffic Comparison - Compete.com

In terms of implementation, Facebook has made it very easy for anyone from a well known brand like Starbucks to a mom and pop shop to a student to create an ad campaign.  Creating an ad campaign happens all on one page and takes just three steps including designing the ad (picture, title and description), selecting your targeting and setting a budget.  This simple process makes it easy for companies to dip their toes and test advertising on social media sites.

But how effective are these ads since ads on Facebook are not the typical large display ad units?  A few weeks ago, I posted an ad on Facebook for a local fundraising event that I was involved in organizing. The 2-day campaign that I created was a very small campaign because of my group’s limited budget so it’s not the best example to look at, but nevertheless 13% of the traffic to my organization’s site came from Facebook in the timeframe that the ad ran.

We looked at a larger campaign that Dice ran on Facebook in October to measure the ad effectiveness using our control exposed methodology.  If you’re a regular frequenter of Facebook, you’ve probably seen a Dice ad (pictured below).

 

Dice is a technical career website that gets about one million visitors per month.  We compared Dice’s share of job site visitors between the control and exposed groups.  The results are pretty astounding.  Dice doubled its share of competitor job site visitors amongst exposed consumers capturing 6% of job site visitors compared to 2% of the control group.  Job sites in the analysis included Monster, CareerBuilder, Yahoo! HotJobs, Indeed and Simply Hired.

Dice's Share of Competitor Job Site Visitors

 

So the next time you are looking for a high reach effective campaign, don’t rule out social media sites like Facebook from your media plan!


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  1. Facebook Applications

    Facebook as well as other social networks have a major contribution in online marketing.
    This is possible that these networks especially Facebook can be a challenge for search engines.

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    Facebook as well as other social networks have a major contribution in online marketing.
    This is possible that these networks especially Facebook can be a challenge for search engines

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  5. MLM Software

    Thank you for this post. It’s ture that Facebook has made it very easy for anyone from a well known brand like Starbucks to a mom and pop shop to a student to create an ad campaign.

  6. Al Carl

    Very nice, but I’d like some more meat to the story.

    What about the actual engagement factors of the Facebook traffic? Bounce rates, time spent on site, page views versus other traffic sources. That type of information is where we’ll see the true benefit if any from the Facebook advertising platform.


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