Shannon Ma Virtualized

Last weekend I decided to post a NetPoint ad on Facebook. I like the general idea of advertising with Facebook since you can target an audience based on their age, location, interests, and job. There aren’t many advertising avenues that offer this kind of granularity. In this post, I plan on sharing this experience and some of my thoughts.

The Experience

Creating an ad is pretty simple, you only need to enter the following info:

• Your web site URL
• The audience you’d like to target
• Ad content
• Pricing model (either based on the number of views or clicks)

I wanted to target IT professionals, so I keyed in a bunch of job titles that were related (e.g. network administrator, IT manager, etc). One nuisance I did find was only being able to target one country. If I have a product or service that can be marketed worldwide, why should I be restricted to just one country?

The pricing models were pretty standard, based on the number of clicks or impressions. Facebook auctions off their ad space, so they will ask you for the maximum price you’re willing to pay per click or impression. I chose to pay per click at 50 cents for each one. Throughout your campaign you will only be charged the amount the ad space sold for, so you may pay less than your bid price. This all works similar to eBay, except it’s for ads.

Once I was done I had created two identical ads for NetPoint. One ad was for the US and had the potential of reaching 25,580 Facebook users. The other ad was targeted for the UK with a potential of reaching 10,580 people. Sounds good, so let’s take a look at the results.

The Results

I let the NetPoint campaign run for a week. As of today, a total of 117 Facebook users clicked on my ad. 68 of these users were from the US and 49 were from the UK. It seems the UK campaign was almost 2x more effective than the US. There are a significant amount of NetPoint customers in the UK, so it’s interesting to see the relationship here.

I paid an average of 42 cents per click for a total of $49.23, not bad for 117 potential customers. However, it looks like I would have been better off paying per impression, saving nearly 25%. Good to know for next time. I initially thought pay per click would have been more effective, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. I assume this is due to a mix of pay per click’s demand and the targeted nature of my ad.

I have to admit that although I am a fan of Facebook, I didn’t initially think of using it for NetPoint. It seemed perfect if you’re targeting teens or students in college, but not very effective if you’re trying to reach businesses. However, a lot of professionals are starting to use social networking sites. As this becomes more popular, I think we’ll start seeing more ads targeted towards the corporate world.