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Should you advertise on Facebook?

Posted 6 November 2007 at 8:29AM by Simon Dickson in Doing business online

Internet analysts Hitwise reckon traffic to Facebook has risen 30-fold in one year; it now accounts for 1.7% of UK internet visits, making it the fifth most visited URL in the country - and perhaps more interestingly, the fifth most popular source of traffic for other websites. Previous Hitwise data has also shown that 4% of people leaving Facebook are going to a retail website: a figure which has doubled during 2007.

So it's no surprise to see Facebook trying to turn those clicks into cash, with its 'Flyers' advertising concept. As we've mentioned previously, it comes in two flavours: the 'basic' method uses an old-school pay-per-appearance model, whilst the newer 'pro' method takes a Google-inspired pay-per-click approach.

'Basic' flyers are almost exactly ten-a-penny: it's $10 - near enough a fiver - for 5,000 impressions. You get the option to target your flyer to a specific gender, age range or Facebook 'network'. But bear in mind: Facebook only offers 17 UK regional networks, so the definition of some locations can be fairly wide.

The newer 'pro' flyers offer much better targeting options. You can target the whole UK, or just individual towns: this time, the filtering seems to be based on the specific 'hometown' location people enter in their personal profile, so it should be fairly precise. There are filters for gender, age range, marital status, political views, and a 'keyword' option which looks at details in people's personal profiles. And as with Google, you specify the maximum you want to pay per click, up to a total daily budget.

So, should your company be considering Facebook as an advertising channel? Certainly, the ability to target people, places and interest groups so precisely is very appealing, and arguably lifts it above Google's market-leading product. And for now at least, there's likely to be much less competition for advertising space, giving you more clicks for your ad spend.

The 'early adopters' are reporting disappointing results (see this example) - possibly due to the unobtrusive positioning in the left-hand margin, possibly because (unlike Google searching) people come to Facebook to use Facebook itself. But with such a large user base, there must be money to be made: don't be surprised if Facebook makes changes to make more of its flyers.

Tags: adsense, advertising, facebook, flyers, google, pay-per-click

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