Are Facebook Ads a Waste of Money?

Facebook may be the big daddy of social media platforms, but it seems more and more challenging for businesses and brands to reach their intended audience on the site.

The controversy about Edgerank and the inability to reach those who have chosen to \”like\” your page led me to conduct my own Facebook advertising experiment.

I\’m ready to share my results.

I fully recognize that this is just one advertisement. I also am aware that the copy, the image and my landing page all have something to do with conversions.

That said, I decided to give away a free copy of my AdSense Secrets ebook. The book currently sells for $27 at AdSense-Secrets.com, so a freebie with no strings attached is compelling.

The goal was to add new subscribers to my email list.

I currently have 14,900 likes to my fan page and typically reach 1000-2000 with my posts. Of course, Facebook always asks that I spend money to \”boost\” my post and reach more people.

I chose to spend $50 to reach 8000-15,000 people.

Over the next two days, Facebook promoted my post. Here are the results.

1380 people saw my post organically. That\’s less than 10% of the people who said they liked my page and wanted to hear from me. Ouch.

748 people saw the post from viral shares.

8520 people saw the post because of my $50 promotion.

So a total of 10,432 people saw the post.

First of all, Facebook promised that a $50 promotion would reach 8000 to 15,000 people. I reached more than 10,000 from ALL efforts, with only 8500 coming from the advertisement. Hmmm… I wonder if others experience Facebook being on the lower end of their promised range of people reached.

Here is the breakdown of people reached.

What really surprises me here is that most of the promoted ads were to FRIENDS of Fans rather than Fans themselves.

That might be because my fans weren\’t online during the promoted period. But I sure would rather reach the people who said they like my page rather than those who never indicated an interest.

How did the ad convert?

This was a free offer and I would have expected a better response.

155 people signed up for the free offer. Of that amount, only 63 confirmed their email address. However, half of those subscribers came from my post BEFORE it was promoted. That means only 30 people confirmed a subscription as a result of the promoted post. So $1.66 for each new email subscriber.

This was a flop as far as I am concerned. I don\’t know that I will be using Facebook promoted ads again in the future.

Have you had any experience with Facebook ads? I\’d be interested in hear more. Please use the comments form below!