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Our ad was “clicked out” within 2 hrs of starting the campaign. So much for free ads on Facebook!

The Last few days

Over the last five or so days we have continued to monitor the ad (you can see it to the right). From the start we had our budget set at $5/day - that stayed the same throughout. However each day we gradually lowered the budget of our price per click from the begining $1 per click to now around $0.30 per click. Each time the ad was clicked out within a couple of hours of it starting again. We were disappointed to say the least - that our ad was so ‘popular’. We were really hoping to have a fair amount of time between the ads being displayed and the ad budget being filled. Anyway let’s get to the results.

• Each day we reduced our budget, our ad had a higher number of clicks;
• Our click through rate was between .05% and .02%;
• On average, the ad had 48931 impressions per day. The highest being 74976, the lowest being 22578.
• The average cost per thousand impressions (CPM) was between $0.22 and $0.08

For the purposes of testing how you might get thousands of impressions without many clicks - this might seem like an okay result. The lowest click through rate (CTR) was 0.02% - virtually no clicks compared to ads served. The only problem was that the ad was up for just 2-3hrs before the budget had ran out. We were hoping for a lot more time than that. Even on the days of $0.30 per click our ad budget was filled within a couple of hours. To mitigate this, I had moved the CPC budget to $0.25 for a few hours. This again had its own problems with hardly any ads being served (maybe 2000 in a few hours) but still clicks on the ad.

Visits to the site

Another hopeful result of advertising Rob’s desperation to get a girlfriend - was to get some ‘freebies’ on his site. No I’m not being coarse, what we wanted was people visiting Rob’s site without clicking on the ad itself. Basically free ad conversions without clicks. We certainly did get them I’ve put them below - you can see the higher number visits to Rob’s site compared with clicks on the ad.

The highest day of clicks also coincides with the highest day of visits. On average the site draws 3-4 visits a day (no traffic) so to see it go to 46 visits (28 ‘free’ visits) was an encouraging sign. Though this cannot be only related to the ad itself. Word had spread that the ad was up - so some people may have not seen the ad but still visited Rob’s site.

Conclusions

• Although being written from a first person perspective and following advice from other observers on its image - the ad still did not receive a high CTR. We were hoping for this anyway - so this can be seen as a good result. However from other people’s advice we were expecting a higher CTR. Most likely taking the option to pay per 1000 impressions is going to cost you a lot more than the potential result you will get from paying per click.
• The main problem we had with this ad was achieving a high impression rate with a low CTR over a long time. Either you don’t get seen and the ad is up for a lot longer, or you do get seen and your ad is gone very quickly. You might get relatively free ads served up - but only for a short period of time.
• We are yet to see if this actually works. That is, that Rob gets a girlfriend. He has had a few contacts because of the ad - let’s see what happens.

~Andrew (email me andrew at brownbox dot net dot au).

There have been various people talking about the value of advertising on Facebook.com recently. Most coming to the conclusion that putting an ad up on Facebook will not get you many clicks but thousands of impressions (times the ad was loaded on a page).

Well we decided to do our own experiment with a little bit of humour to see what the results would be. The purpose? To test variations of ads, and recommendations from other marketers online regarding Facebook’s advertising results.

We created the ad to the right for our first test. The ad is uses the Facebook colours and similar style branding to take the advice of one blogger who said it might increase click throughs or noticability. See below for the cost per click, and the budget set at $5 per day. This ad has a run of 7 days, you can see the first results below - at the end of the campaign in 7 days. The “target market” - Women aged between 18-30 from Australia.

Our initial results (after about 2hrs of having the ad up).

Here’s the initial response :

1. 22578 impressions (in about 2hrs)
2. 10 clicks
3. 2 new Facebook friends for Rob
4. 1 filled in the form on the website www.roblincolne.com

See More Results

The dot com boom was all about hits - the more hits on your website the more money when you float it publicly or sell it. That’s what the bust was about too - hits weren’t necessarily making any companies money and they meant very little in terms of revenue to a company. It was like telling people that 500,000 people came into your shop each day - but only 5 people bought anything. Not really a sustainable business model. Especially when your company raises $40mil to just get $1mil of sales.

Since then businesses have been much more focussed on what visitors are doing while they are on their website. Where do they go? What do they click on? How many clicked on where?

Those are all good things to know but here are 5 statistics that can help you grow your website and business that most business people and marketers don’t think about.

Brown Box uses Google Analytics to find the best statistics to help businesses to meet the needs of their customers online.

1. Page Bounce Rate
   The page bounce rate tells you the percentage of single page visits that a particular page has had. Lower your bounce rate and you have more people engaging with your website and clicking on at least one more page in the site. The more they engage with you, the more likely they are to buy from you. If your home page has a high bounce rate, measure a few variations of the page and check their bounce rate. Over time you can see if your bounce rate drops or lowers with certain versions of the page.
2. Conversion Goals
   Analytics allows you to set up what it calls goals. A way of measuring if a visitor has taken a certain action on your website (like filling in a contact form). You can set your funnel (the track which you think people will take to get to the goal) and measure its effectiveness. See where people have abandoned the funnel and see if that page needs addressing. A potential customer has come to a page and decided to make payment but sees a security warning and runs away screaming. Your conversion goals will help you find out where people are leaving and can help you move potential customers from scared to confident purchasers.
3. Browser Capabilities
   This may seem like a statistic that has nothing to do with the way you run your website. Nothing could be more wrong. Your website is there to cater to the needs of your customers. If they can’t access your 100% Flash (and so totally awesome) website because they don’t have the latest Flash version then you are losing business. Find out a way to cater to your customer’s needs and give them what they want. Analytics also offers statistics on resolutions, colours, browsers and operating systems, and java support.
4. Language Settings
   Believe it or not - some people don’t speak English. Do you sell products to a market that doesn’t speak English? One of our clients has a website which is visited by customers with 10 different language settings, another has customers of with 34 language settings - the third highest language is Dutch. Those customers view almost 8 pages per visit. Wouldn’t you want those people to be able to understand you? Luckily for the Dutch speaking/reading visitors that website has been translated for them and they can understand how to buy products from the website.
5. Top Landing Pages
   I believe that this statistic is extremely helpful. Use this statistic to work out where most people are when they enter the website. The home page is the most obvious page that people would land on but if people are getting to a page that has no menu, has no other way to view the rest of your valuable information then the action they most likely will take is to leave again. Ensure that those top pages have a way for users to get to the rest of your website. Especially if those landing pages have high bounce rates. Again - engage your visitors, give them a compelling reason to stay around and spend more time there (with great content). You might even find that a large entrance point to your site is a page that no longer exists - well put something there to help people get to your content. It’s that easy. Make the most of the people who come in from wherever they come.

I have many times looked at the statistics in these areas and more to evaluate the value our clients are getting from their website. Lowering a bounce rate 10% for the entire site is not a hard thing to do - and it can bring substantial rewards. If you want help measuring or understanding your website - contact me and I’d be glad to help.

~Andrew.