Facebook advertising costs

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Facebook advertising costs

as opposed to Adwords

zulu_dude

2:45 pm on Jan 13, 2011 (gmt 0)

I've got a subscription based website service. It's a recently launched site and I've only been using Adwords and Facebook to market the site for the past two months.

After looking at reports for the past 60 days, it appears that Facebook is costing almost exactly 4 times more than Adwords for the same result.

I've narrowed down my Facebook targetting as much as I can but it still seems to come in way more expensive than Adwords.

Is this a general trend that others have also seen? Is Facebook just more expensive than Adwords? Is it a seasonal thing (i.e. Facebook ads go way more expensive just before Christmas)?

woop01

2:50 pm on Jan 13, 2011 (gmt 0)

My experience has been that it was 2-3x more expensive per visitor than Adwords.

wildbest

4:24 pm on Jan 13, 2011 (gmt 0)

After looking at reports for the past 60 days, it appears that Facebook is costing almost exactly 4 times more than Adwords for the same result.

There are a lot of fraudulent click activity going on FB. In contrast to AW they didn't care to honor our refund requests. So, I've canceled all our PPC ad campaigns there.

zulu_dude

4:45 pm on Jan 13, 2011 (gmt 0)

Fraudlent activity was one of the first things I thought could be causing this.

Out of interest I've just checked my analytics and visitors coming from Adwords spend an average of 3m16s on the site. In contrast, users coming from Facebook ads spend an average of 44s on the site. That's a pretty damning statistic!

In defence of Facebook ads, Adwords are by their nature more targeted as they're shown to people who are specifically interested in the service I offer. Facebook ads are shown to everyone who 'may' be interested.

Bobaloula

1:16 pm on Jan 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

It would be interesting to know if there was a trend in your sales not attridutted to facebook or adwords. I'm looking into facebook as a suppliment to adwords now and wanted to know if it helped with branding. The thread answers my other questions, thank you.

wildbest

1:59 pm on Jan 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

That's a pretty damning statistic!

We have noticed that more than 3/4 of suspicious traffic was coming from FB games like farmville, pet society, fishville, happy pets, etc. We have asked FB not to serve our ads on those game pages. They said no way. Then we stopped our ads. But who knows, you might be luckier than we are? :)

Bobaloula

2:38 pm on Jan 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

Thats like Google saying you have to have content network with search, if you can't drill down I'm sure it will turn a lot of people off

whats up skip

10:30 am on Jan 26, 2011 (gmt 0)

There are so many limitations with the current Facebook advertising.

I don't know if FB doesn't care about their advertisers because they think they are so popular or if they are just slow at investing in developing their advertising platform.

FB is good for building awareness or a brand, but hopeless for sales. At best it will only perform as well as Google's network, unless people start using it as their primary point of search, but that's not going to happen unless they dramatically improve their search.

whats up skip

10:33 am on Jan 26, 2011 (gmt 0)

We have noticed that more than 3/4 of suspicious traffic was coming from FB games like farmville, pet society, fishville, happy pets, etc.

How can you tell where your traffic is coming from?
I haven't been able to find this in the reports.

digitalv

9:09 pm on Jan 28, 2011 (gmt 0)

Your advertising dollars are usually better spent at the convention where people are looking for exactly what you sell than at the coffee shop up the road.

Apply the same analogy to Google vs. Facebook.