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Facebook opened up its advertising to make it easier for anyone to publish ads on their network, we all waited with baited breath and after a month or so the results are in.

Facebook Ads….
Sort of sucks

The general public jury
From comments here and around the web the overall consensus has been little or no visits from Facebook users, on the good side those reporting visits have high conversions. Chatting and gathering statistics the highly targeted ads, those looking at specific gender, age and location had the highest click through rate sitting at just under 0.5% while un-targetted traffic was sitting at the 0.42% mark these are not staggering statistics. Conversions were much more positive with the a conversion rate for affiliate offers at just under 6% which is staggering high one user was reporting a conversion rate of 86% though by his own admission he had under 100 visits. Blogs and social sites converted better then more traditional sites. Zip and email submits also did well but many people reporting that ads were being cancelled. This was the biggest complaint Facebook advertising standards policy is incredibly patchy with users being banned for little or no reason while others were getting away with murder (not literally) out of my 4 test campaigns I had 1 blocked as having sexual references! In case you are wondering here is the sexual reference in question,

Come on boys and join the party

Clearly a deeply offensive phrase! Overall few people were grumbling about the spiral costs of campaigns but I suspect this was more due to the lack of volume which meant that most people paying per click were not reaching their daily limit.

My own experience
My little test which I discussed here, had a series of 4 campaigns running on it, 1 was blocked as above 1 had a CTR of 1.2% and a conversion rate of 4.6% and while it ran I covered costs and made about 3% profit on the campaign. The second campaign had a much lower conversion rate and a much more tighter demographic, its CTR was 0.8% but was rewarded with a higher conversion rate of 4.9% however with the increased cost per click this campaign barely broke even. The final campaign failed miserably resulting in just 4 clicks and no converts.

Facebook needs to play fair?
So what went wrong why such low clicks? Well it goes back to why you were targeting Facebook users in the first place, they are a walled garden Facebook ads are not striking and do not appear within the users normal click area so many users simply don’t see the adverts. But the real issue is with Facebook ad policy I’m all for rules don’t get me wrong but you need to apply rules fairly which from my experience and the feedback given they seem not to be doing.