Posted 3. April 2009, 11:58 by Jenny Orr
Category : Home   Learning & teaching developments

As previously posted in the forum, I ran a facebook advertising campaign for a week to achieve higher reach and drive traffic to the blog quickly. A budget of $4 was set with a starting bid of $0.25 cost per click that was revised throughout the week.
After experimentation with bid amounts, a correlation became apparent between CPC and CTR; as the CPC bid was lowered, the CTR increased, providing better value for money, possibly due to users noticing the ads more in off peak times when there is less activity and people online as users are less busy on the site and more prone to distraction as with offline media behaviour. Therefore towards the end of the campaign I lowered the CPC down to $0.15 from $0.30 so that the advert would be shown at less peak times. This produced a significant rise in click through rate (CTR) to 0.8, improving campaign efficiency.

Running a facebook advertising campaign was rewarding in the sense that I could see the adverts up that I’d made and it’s very easy to do, it seems odd that more brands are not trying it out but most are very risk adverse when it comes to experimenting with new technology. Debate has surrounding facebook ads’ effectiveness therefore I chose to pay per click (PPC) rather than impression. Members of the site claim they don’t notice the adverts but my results show otherwise, generating 133 clicks in a week.

However, the conversion rate of clicks to donations is still low at 0.08% with only 3 donations being made from 372 visits, none of which were derived from the facebook advert which suggests quality of traffic is not high. More specific targeting would aid this issue but Facebook at present do not facilitate this but plans have been made to introduce it in the future. Paid search sites such as GoogleAdwords may bring more valuable visitors as behavioural targeting is facilitated to reach those who are actively concerned about male cancers, sponsoring words such as ‘donate’ ‘donation’ ‘charity’ ‘cancer’ or ‘cancer research’ however competition and cost is higher, timely and out of budget for this particular campaign. Facebook did however provide a valuable learning experience in working with CPC’s and CTR’s and see the results.