Ad Results With Facebook Ads

On the 13th of February 2014, I started my ad campaign with Facebook ads as part of my social media strategy in promoting my online business. This is my first time doing so and I was convinced that it wouldn’t turn out well. But I wanted to test and feel to see for myself how it works.

Whether or not it turns out profitable for me, there will always be something that I (and you) can learn from.

There are a few ways to advertise on Facebook. I will only write down the ones below that I engaged in:

1st – Getting more ‘likes’ to my fan page

This is so called to be the ‘legitimate’ way of doing such things as it does not violate Facebook’s policies. After all, they’re the ones whom we are paying our advertising dollars… 🙂

At first, I requested for likes that come only from United States, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and premium countries only. However after many hours, surprisingly I did not receive many likes. It came in very slow.

I stopped the campaign after getting only 8 likes. It costs me $0.74 per like from these premium countries and the total cost is S$5.88

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I wanted the ‘likes’ to come in faster, so I changed the campaign settings by adding these countries to my list: Singapore & Malaysia (and Indonesia afterwards)

Within a few minutes, the likes started to come in quickly especially from Malaysia. I started to observe the people who liked my page and I noticed they are real people, with real number of friends who are engaged in their discussions. However, I was surprised as to why they were so quick to like my page even without knowing or reading my posts. (We’ll get back to the analysis at the later part of this post)

Here are my results:

I got a total of 53 likes before I stopped the campaign. The total dollars spent for this is S$12.27 and the cost per like was only S$0.23, much cheaper than the first campaign.

2nd – Getting hits to an external URL

I set up a campaign to redirect visitors to my squeeze page promoting my main newsletter. Below are a few screenshots of all the information from the ad:

Impression: 4380
Cost: $0.34 per click
Total Clicks: 9

The clicks were extremely slow to be fulfilled. From the images above, you can see that I was only interested in getting clicks from premium countries like United States, UK, Canada, Australia & New Zealand. I didn’t expect the clicks to be delivered at a slow pace.

Obviously this needs improvement from my part as I’m considered to be a complete novice in Facebook ads.

In the end, I stopped the campaign totally after getting only 9 clicks for a total cost of S$3.08.

3rd – Post Boost

Post boost is simply advertising solely our posts. I decided to try out boosting just one post, as seen on the image below:

From the above image, you can clearly see how ‘popular’ my post is! 🙂 LOL…

The boost generated 11,712 impressions (doesn’t necessarily mean everyone reads it) along with a whopping 131 likes! It seems to be a success, however upon careful inspection, NONE of the people who liked the post was ever engaged in any sort of conversation with the post.

Brief Analysis

Obviously, what I’m about to conclude here doesn’t necessarily represent the overall opinion of people who use Facebook ads to boost their business. However, the tests above show proof that there is definitely a loophole somewhere in the system, which in turn will hurt the thousands of advertising dollars that are constantly being pumped into Facebook ads.

The likes generated for the page brings out suspicious activities that circulate among Facebook community. Upon checking just a few of their profiles, all of them like hundreds, if not thousands of pages at one time!!

How is that possible?

How can someone ever like almost everything?

The main purpose of Facebook likes is for the person to stay engaged with the content of a page that interests them. No one in the right state of mind has all the time to stay engaged in hundreds or thousands of interests at one time.

This simply shows that they either like the pages for fun (or for no reason), OR they are compensated for it through click farms companies.

The same thing happens to the boosting of post above. The 131 likes does not create any difference at all to the post as there was ZERO engagement with the post.

Overall verdict:

BE CAREFUL with Facebook ads .. Only do it with proper guidance and training, and through proven methods.

I never said that facebook ads do not work, but one has to simply do enough research and due diligence before spending un-necessary money on facebook ads.

I personally do know of my own friend who is doing great with facebook ads. That doesn’t mean you will get the same results too. In fact, my friend only advertises to his friends’ friends list, which goes to show that he limits his advertising circles ONLY to his own friends & his friends’ friends… these are REAL people who are engaged in REAL conversations on Facebook almost on a daily basis.

That is just one of the proven methods… There are more surely, but my advice is to be careful with it..

Stay safe and sharp!

Best Regards,
Zai Adi

ps: I have now de-activated my current Facebook fan page and re-opened a new one to ‘clean up’ my ‘likes’ list of contacts. I’d rather have just a bunch of few people engaging in my posts rather than the exact opposite!