I've decided to explore the world of Facebook Advertising after watching one of Marcus' videos from his website.  I have used Google's Adwords for the past 3 days and fronted $105 for my ad before it even became active.  That means I have to spend $105 even if I decided to bail out on PPC advertising with $50 left in the pot.

The reason I chose to experiment with Facebook advertising is for the demographic feature for targeted marketing.  I'm promoting a product that came with an in-depth demographical report that let's me know 75% of the people who bought the product and took the survey were female, 85% were married, 70% were between the ages of 35 and 55, listed 3 States in the US that contributed to over 20% of all sales, and most had at least some college background.  90% were white ethnicity, but Facebook doesn't use ethnicity for targeting ads.

I used this information to plug into the demographical targeting fields at Facebook and Facebook instantly updated how many  users my ad could potentially reach.  The more targeting I did, the lower the number became.  I wanted the most bang for my buck, so I tried to target only the people most likely to purchase the product.  This targeted number was about 3.6 million Facebook users.

My headline for my ad targets exactly the type of female I am looking for.  I also put in the ad description that there is a Money-Back Guarantee, so the person will know that they will be clicking on something that will be asking them for money.  I might suffer from some Impression to Click Ratio, which Facebook might not like, but I only want to spend money for a click if the person is open to the idea to spend some money. 

Now I could have gone another route with my description and offer a Free Step-By-Step guide that a person might find useful.  By downloading the guide, the person would need to opt-in to an email list and hopefully after getting familiar with the program, the person will eventually buy the actual product.  This would result in more clicks on my Facebook ad, meaning I'm spending more money on the ad and probably converting less people in the end to buy the product just because I'm thinking most of the Free clickers have no intentions of the upsale.  My link actually takes them to the Free Opt-In option anyway, I just don't advertise it in the ad.

I decided to run my ad for the next 5 days with a conservative budget of $10 a day.  I picked this number because of the low success I've had with Adwords so far.  I also bid $2.00 per click max, which is within the range Facebook suggested for my ad, but the actual bids could end up being less than $2.00.  I submitted my Paypal information and ran into a browser glitch, but luckily when I logged out and logged back into Facebook, my ad campaign was submitted and pending activation.  Less than 10 minutes later, my ad was active.  Edit (next morning) My ad is NOT active.  I see that there are two different windows to analyze your campaigns.  My CAMPAIGN is active with a green icon.  However, my ACTUAL AD window shows that the ad is still waiting for review.

I clicked on my billing tab in the Facebook campaign manager and noticed that I don't seem to have a $50 credit to chip away from.  That's because Facebook only charges you for the actual clicks I attract and will bill me when the next billing period is over.  So if I only use up $20 out of my $50 budget in the next 5 days, Facebook will charge my Paypal account $20. 

Not only do I have advertising to a targeted audience on a major social website, I also only pay what I owe from actual clicks. Now doesn't that make Sense?   

March 6, 2011 My ad was finally approved at 8:48PM.  I was writing an article during that time and didn't get around to checking my email until about 10PM.  The email informed me that my ad was approved and I clicked on the link to go to the Facebook User interface to see that my $10 for the day had been used up already.  I don't know if it took 72 minutes to use up the $10 or if it only took 5 minutes to use up my budget, but I have 36,500 impressions with a CTR of 0.025% .  I'm pretty sure Yahoo isn't going to like me for such a low CTR, but I got 9 clicks that averaged $1.11 a pop.  I'm going to cut my max bid from $2.00 down to $0.40 per click and see if that slows down the rate that my ad displays and give me a chance to fit more clicks within my budget.

So sometime within that 72-minute time period, my affiliate product page has 11 unique facebook referrals.  This lead me to wonder where the 2 extra clicks came from.  I don't have an answer for that but while I was looking to see if my ad included a visual web address to my landing page, I was very TICKED OFF to see that there was indeed an address in my ad, but it wasn't my own, it was the direct address to the website that offers the product.  In other words I could potentially lose a customer because a person can manually type the address into their browser and go directly to the sales pitch and bypass my affiliate ID.  I think I will go complain to Facebook and see what they say.

March 13, 2011 So, I spent about $25 with Facebook ads and got 32 clicks and zero sales.  Now, I was linking them to an opt-in page, so I'll just hold off on this particular campaign and see if any of these leads convert to sales over the next couple of weeks.  The product I'm affiliated with brings in an $80 commission, so I would hope to at least make one sale after spending $25.  If it works, I'll try it again.

I have made the realization of another big difference between AdWords and Facebook Ads.  With Adwords, you are targeting people who are looking for a solution, these people are in better position to take action.  With Facebook Ads, you are targeting a specific demographic, where people might not be looking for an answer, but your ad might strike the right person.   Adwords, people find you.  Facebook, you go find the people.  I tried to make a campaign that targeted people ready to buy.  Perhaps the product I chose isn't worth putting anymore of my money into.  I'll just have to wait and see if I get any conversions from what is now an email campaign to anybody that opted in.  No worries, I've got another niche I'm passionate about and have been focusing my time on writing articles and building a website on and know that I'll make money on when I've got all the pieces constructed.  This Facebook Campaign is just an experiment with a secondary niche of mine.