Facebook Advertising: Good News!

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I posted on here a little while ago about the new advertising system Facebook have launched.

Never being one to shy away from new marketing channels and “first mover” advantage, I decided to do a small test.

Here’s what happened:

Just incase the Facebook ads didn’t work, I decided not to promote my website or any of my clients on Facebook, as it could prove embarrassing. So I decided on promoting a pretty standard ebook that was available on the affiliate website, Clickbank.

(For those that aren’t in the know, affiliate marketing is where you get paid commission if you sell someone else’s product for them)

Now, promoting affiliate products using Google Adwords in my experience, is either very difficult or bloody impossible to break even! Also to make matters worse, I’ve always had the reverse Midas touch with affiliate marketing and have stuck to promoting “real” businesses instead.

So all in all, I wasn’t expecting much from Facebook and didn’t fancy my chances…

However, in the name of research for you, the dedicated blog reader, I soldiered on and created my Facebook ad campaign with my affiliate link in it and let it run…

I needn’t have worried.

In the first week, because I set my bid price a little too high, I broke even.

This week so far, I’ve spent $12.10, and received $17.72 in commission from sales of the ebook I’ve been promoting. That’s a $5.62 profit if I’m not mistaken!

Clearing 5 bucks (or about £2.50 here in the UK) doesn’t really sound like a lot does it? It certainly won’t make you rich, but that’s not the point.

The point is:

• I’ve taken a product where the market in the search engines is ferociously competitive (and margins are pretty tight!),
• Demographically targeted Facebook users who would be interested in the product,
• Paid far, far less for a click than I would do on any decent pay per click search engine,
• And turned a profit!

The last point is the most important one

This means if I can turn a $5 profit on a low value affiliate ebook, I’m sure you could gain some extra leads or sales for your business using this method, especially if your average transaction is reasonably high (£100 or more).

Now, remember to track the number of visitors you had from Facebook ads and if you can, track how many conversions (goals) the Facebook ads generated. Google Analytics can do this for you. When you have this data, you can work out how much a lead/sale cost you, and calculate your visitor value from there. (You can use my visitor value tool by downloading it here)

I think this could be big and I highly recommend you look into Facebook ads while it’s fresh and people are still catching on. Opportunity knocks, people…

Speak to you soon,

George.

PS: A couple of things you should know:

I haven’t revealed the product or market I’m promoting on Facebook because I want to keep the experiment as fair as possible and not artificially influence the results. However when there is sufficient data, I’ll publish it as a case study.

I’m not affiliated to, and have no connections - financial or otherwise with Facebook.