Posted in We’ve recently been looking to staff some sales positions here at RealPageMaker and decided to try using Facebook.com for a few days to promote our employment opportunities. Here’s what we found:
1. Facebook does not have a traffic estimator
This is an important omission. Google Adwords provides tools that generate estimates of click-through traffic volumes your ad will get based on your cost-per-click bid. This allows you to get a rough idea of how many visitors your campaign will generate.
Facebook suggests a bid range (Google does not do this) and seems to assume that as long as you bid in this range you’ll spend roughly your daily budget (they clearly say that you will not exceed your daily budget). Here’s a screenshot of the traffic analysis Facebook gave us for our careers ad (we’ve run it for 4 days so far):
Facebook Ad Summary
Over the last 4 days we’ve used about 67% of our daily budget ($25.00) which means that we’d achieve more traffic by increasing our cost-per-click slightly. With Facebook we’ll need to do this over a few days – with Google we could do this immediately.
2. Facebook advertising allows you to target geographically like Google, but also allows you to target specific ages, and educations. Check out these example advertising campaigns I priced out (estimated traffic based on our experience of using 67% of the daily budget):
Chicago (including 10-miles surrounding)
Target: men, women, older than 30, all education levels
Potential ad reach: 441,000
Estimated Cost Per Click: $0.56
Estimated Traffic: 30 visits/dayTarget: men, women, older than 30, ONLY College grads
Potential ad reach: 10,480
Estimated Cost Per Click: $0.66
Estimated Traffic: 25 visits/day
Vancouver (including 10-miles surrounding)
Target: men, women, older than 30, all education levels
Potential ad reach: 172,240
Estimated Cost Per Click: $0.33
Estimated Traffic: 51 visits/dayTarget: men, women, older than 30, ONLY College grads
Potential ad reach: 2840
Estimated Cost Per Click: $0.08
Estimated Traffic: 209 visits/day (might be difficult to achieve this)
Google Adwords allows you to target search terms very specifically, whereas Facebook doesn’t. Google also has sophisticated search term tools that Facebook doesn’t. Google doesn’t let you pick who clicks on your ads though, whereas Facebook does. Facebook’s ad platform, while not as rich, is easier to use and quicker to sign up for.
Soon I’ll talk about some other experiences we’ve had with online advertising campaigns.
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