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Poll: Does Facebook advertising work for you?

news.ycombinator.com

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21–30 of 38 posts

Re: Poll: Does Facebook advertising work for you?

#21

Post by klbarry »

mattgratt wrote: post #4

It can. It's not as good a DR channel as paid search, simply because you're buying demographics and interests rather than intent. However, for list building and 'softer' DR actions like a whitepaper download or a lead form fill, it can work very well. There's also a lot of off-the-wall targeting things you can do, like advertising your blogger program to mommy bloggers, targeting reporters at techcrunch and mashable…

I had some plans for similar off the wall strategies for a jean launch in December- can I send you an email?

Re: Poll: Does Facebook advertising work for you?

#22

Post by alain94040 »

I stand by the comments I wrote a year ago (http://blog.foundrs.com/2011/04/01/sell-your-google-stock-li...): compared to Google, Facebook ads are a godsend. I probably spend ~ $5,000/year on Facebook ads.

You can tell Google AdWords is designed by a committee of engineers. It's amazingly complex. I challenge you to make sense of the scoring that supposedly explains why your ads are showing or not. I don't think your average user has any clue why or how their campaigns work or don't work.

In my opinion, AdWords is ready for disruption, and Google will not know what hit them until it's too late. They are the legacy system now. It feels like using an IBM 3270 terminal when all the cool kids moved on to the VT100 :-)

Re: Poll: Does Facebook advertising work for you?

#23

Post by fbuilesv »

I used a $50 coupon I had lying around to direct people to a landing page for a product targeted towards gamers. Being able to be super specific in the people I wanted to show the ad too was nice and in return for the $50 I got 89 people interested enough in the product to leave their email addresses. I still don't know if this qualifies as successful or not.

Re: Poll: Does Facebook advertising work for you?

#25

Post by huhtenberg »

jeremymcanally wrote: post #24

It works incredibly well for my wife's necktie/bowtie biz ( http://wickhamhousebrand.com ) but has sucked any sort of nerdy thing (eBooks, apps, etc.) I've tried to promote. I'm guessing nerds don't take well to that sort of ad?

Nerds probably have the AdBlock installed :)

Re: Poll: Does Facebook advertising work for you?

#26

Post by marcanthonyrosa »

Unless you have enough capital to sustain Facebook ads for a long period, they're never going to work.

We'll see how the Facebook Timeline and the new F8 solutions react to advertisers and businesses. But, unless you're an event-centric business, you're not going to benefit tremendously on Facebook.

Instead, the best methods are to drive traffic towards mediums like Twitter, where you can have conversations with customers without appearing like you're "on show" in front of an audience. You're a customer for someone else, and you're savvy enough to read into social media advertisements with skepticism. You can't tell me that that's unique to just you.

Re: Poll: Does Facebook advertising work for you?

#27

Post by jeffreymcmanus »

huhtenberg wrote: post #25
jeremymcanally wrote: post #24

It works incredibly well for my wife's necktie/bowtie biz ( http://wickhamhousebrand.com ) but has sucked any sort of nerdy thing (eBooks, apps, etc.) I've tried to promote. I'm guessing nerds don't take well to that sort of ad?

Nerds probably have the AdBlock installed :)

If nobody sees your ad, it costs you nothing. Whether the ad is effective or not is a function of whether you can convert a clickthrough.

Re: Poll: Does Facebook advertising work for you?

#28

Post by huhtenberg »

jeffreymcmanus wrote: post #27
huhtenberg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nerds probably have the AdBlock installed :)

If nobody sees your ad, it costs you nothing. Whether the ad is effective or not is a function of whether you can convert a clickthrough.

AdBlock in Chrome prevents ad images from being displayed, but they are still downloaded. This is different from FF where ads are blocked at the downloading stage. In other words the impression counter can easily go up without ads being actually seen.

Re: Poll: Does Facebook advertising work for you?

#29

Post by antirez »

fbuilesv wrote: post #23

I used a $50 coupon I had lying around to direct people to a landing page for a product targeted towards gamers. Being able to be super specific in the people I wanted to show the ad too was nice and in return for the $50 I got 89 people interested enough in the product to leave their email addresses. I still don't know if this qualifies as successful or not.

a little more than 50 cents for leaving you the email, with some form of agreement that let you send informative messages on your product to these emails, is in my opinion a successful result.

Re: Poll: Does Facebook advertising work for you?

#30

Post by div »

kerryfalk wrote: post #19

I have run a few test campaigns on AdWords and Facebook recently. I was expecting better traffic and conversions from my Google campaign. The exact opposite happened, and by a large margin. I received a lot more traffic from Google in a shorter timeframe but converted that traffic to registered users somewhere in the 5% range - I wasn't really happy with that. I believe the root cause there was the words I was pickin…

Just out of curiosity, which of the two platforms had the higher net number of conversions ?

It feels like this is very relevant especially since you think your next Adwords campaign will be more successful.

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