Facebook advertising discrepancies

Posted on 21. Feb, 2010 by Craig Killick in Digital Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing & Sales, Social Media

I honestly think there are opportunities on Facebook for advertising at the moment, but I have a very big but.

Firstly, I have to say, I am successfully running two pages on Facebook, with adverts to drive traffic. I’ve spent about £50 over three weeks driving fans to my pages for two beauty salons – Beauty Box and Truly Scrumptious. This has also resulted in a massive uptake in newsletter subscribers for email marketing, which is one of the KPIs of the website. So, I am happy with this and the ROI of what this could lead to. As far as marketing campaigns go, I can see the ROI.

But, this weekend I thought I’d try adverts to products pages on another of my websites. Impressions and click-throughs seemed pretty good considering the demographic I’d chosen, right up until the point I compared Facebook data with my Analytics which showed me 9 clicks compared to the 19 I had paid for.

When you are paying 32p per click for an average sale value of £30 (profit £10), you need to make sure you are getting value.

Now, I know there are a whole host of reasons why these may not tally (and I expect a variation on numbers) but percentage wise, it’s nearly 100% out. This surely can’t be right. I had also selected UK people only, so was a little pissed off when I tracked one of my first click-throughs back to someone, in Holland!

I appreciate these systems are complex and I am not giving it much time and blah blah blah, but my business isn’t large enough to live test someone elses ad system.

Sort it out.