Eric Edelstein

I’ve been testing Facebook flyers over the last few weeks - I previously tried the CPM facebook flyers where you pay for each time your advert is shown.

Although Facebook can hyper target like I discussed earlier, that doesn’t mean the click through rate is high. On Search Engines people are searching for a topic and so click on one of the results, whether it is natural or sponsored listings.

On Facebook and other Social Media sites…

…the ads are pushed at people who aren’t looking for that particular topic, and so the click through rate is expected to be much lower.

IT WAS! It was REALLY low compared to search marketing and on a par with Search Marketing which is a bit surprising as hyper targetting should be higher than banner advertising. But I guess it really needs some deep analysis to compare targetted vs untargetted banner advertising with hyper targetting, as it depends on the hyper targetting you select. If you only select age and a few other typical categories, then it isn’t different from targetted banner advertising where a person is required to log in and the site knows their demographic and personal information.

So I was unsurprised when the CPM advertising gave me a low number of visitors, and was an expensive test.

So now Facebook has launched their Facebook Flyers premium edition which they have labelled Facebook Flyers Pro, which lets you only pay for visitors.

The click through rate is still really low, which means great branding for very little for smart Internet marketers. Obviously this will change over time, as more people start using Facebook Flyers pro and they’ll only display the most hyper targetted ads - those which use all the drop down and tick box preferences so that the click through rate is higher.

Until then, it reminds me of affiliate marketing where you don’t pay for branding and only pay for results.

The one thing I didn’t like about the Facebook pro flyers was that Facebook doesn’t tell you when you set up the ad why they don’t allow it if you use URL’s or words they don’t like and which get picked up in their filter. I’m sure the list and details are somewhere in their FAQ but I’ve been lazy! (anyone know where the list of rules is on Facebook?)

But there are more surprises as even if the ads are approved, they seem to have a manual checking process as a 2nd stage so when you log in later you might have a nasty surprise and find many of your pro flyers are deactivated.

Once again, no reason given!

This reminds me of when Overture and google were building their pay per click ad systems many years back. Lots of cheap traffic available for the smart Internet Marketer.