I often hear people say, “I don’t want to use Facebook ads because I don’t want to reach teenagers or college students. I want to reach 25-65 year old decision makers.”
5-10 years ago, teenagers were the primary audience on Facebook. Today, though, it’s a much different story – nearly everyone, even grandparents, has a Facebook account.
And Facebook Ads aren’t what they used to be either. I remember trying to guess what B2B decision makers’ interests were so I could try to target them on Facebook. Ads were designed to drive clicks or “likes” and that was it – not good for most business objectives.
Fast forward to 2015. As of this writing, Facebook has 10 different objectives you can use for your ads.
These objectives cover nearly every goal you might have for your Facebook PPC campaign. Recently, I decided to put some of the objectives to the test. Here’s what I found.
Background
I do social media on a volunteer basis for a local community band I’m in. We’ve used Facebook ads for a few years now to promote our big concert events. In the past, I’d just do a “boost post” or post engagement type of campaign. We got decent results, but this year I decided to try 3 different objectives: Event Responses, Post Engagement, and Website Clicks.
I created an event for the upcoming concert, and also wrote a Facebook post about it. We had a landing page with details about the concert on our band website, so I used that page for the website clicks campaign. The campaigns were geotargeted to Michigan, and I layered on interest targeting for those interested in community bands to fine-tune the audience.
I also decided to try letting Facebook set CPCs based on the objectives, rather than managing them manually. This was a big step for me – normally, I’m not a fan of letting the PPC engines control my bids, but I wanted to see what would happen.
We ran the ads for about 3 weeks prior to the event, and split our budget evenly across the 3 campaigns.
Results
First, let’s look at the basics: impressions and clicks.
This is exciting on its own: nearly 32,000 people saw our ads, we got nearly 600 clicks, and a 1.80% CTR. For social PPC, that’s huge – I consider anything over 1% to be very good.
Remember, though, that a click in social PPC is usually a click on anything in the ad that can be clicked. For Facebook, that includes post likes, shares, comments, and link clicks. And we didn’t just want people to “like” the post – we wanted them to plan to come to the event!
Let’s look at some metrics that give a better indication of intent. Did each campaign achieve its objective?
I’d say the answer is yes. The event response campaign had 63 engagements, most of which were event responses. If all of those people came to the concert, the entire campaign would have been a success based on that alone.
The post engagement campaign had a whopping 178 engagements, and also generated 21 website clicks and 15 page likes. So it drove people to the website, even though that wasn’t the objective, and we also found more people who like the page and will see announcements for future concerts. Plus, hopefully some of the 178 who engaged with the post came to the concert too.
The website clicks campaign also did what it was supposed to. It drove 108 clicks to the site. If only a fraction of those people came to the concert, we’d be happy.
Put them all together and it adds up to a successful campaign in terms of user actions.
But how much did all this cost?
Now, you really can’t beat that. Less than $150 for 129 clicks to the site, 19 new likes and 50 event responses? What a deal! $0.26 per click is a bargain, too – it’s been a while since I’ve seen $0.26 CPCs in search.
The huge eye-opener here is that these were bids managed by the Facebook algorithm, not by my bid management prowess. I’m not sure I could have done any better, and I might have done worse. I was amazed to find that we got such great CPCs by letting Facebook do their thing. It took a lot less time to manage, and was highly successful.
Conclusion
The campaign was a rousing success – not only in the number of responses we got, but also what I learned from it. Part of the reason I tried the 3 different campaigns was to test how well they each worked. Sure, I’ve used Facebook PPC frequently for “official” client business, but usually with a defined objective – for example, the client wants to drive website clicks, so we choose that objective. I never tested multiple objectives side by side to see how they’d perform. I have to say, I’m really impressed.
Have you seen similar results from objective-based Facebook Ads campaigns? Did they deliver what they were supposed to at a great cost? Share in the comments!
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