Creating Facebook Ads and Comparing with AdWords

I have been getting some hits from Facebook, so I thought I would experiment with their ad.

As I have been selling Shiroi Koibito Japanese Chocolate, I have been using Google AdWords.  (You can see my other posts about my experience with Google AdWords).  Facebook ad is pretty similar to Google AdWords approach where we can specify the keywords.  Facebook calls this "Interest" which is pretty much similar concept as keywords.  Comparing with AdWords, Facebook does not have as many tweaks that you can do with Interest (Keywords); however, they allow narrowing down audiences from social perspective which Google does not.  These include: gender, age, location (which Google also has), relationship status, education and work places.

The ad mechanism works pretty much same as AdWords where we pay for the click.  We specify daily maximum spending and how much to pay per click.  The amount per click seemed to be little more expensive side than Google.  Google has a concept of Quality Score to determine the relativity of the ad; more relative the ad/site to the keywords, cheaper the cost to us.  Facebook does not have such concept, and suggested cost was higher than what was suggested by Google for relative ads.  Based on my criteria, Facebook suggested that I pay $0.53 to $1.24 per click; where as AdWords suggested cost of a relative ad was ranging around $0.20-$0.30 per click.

Creating my first ad did not take more than 10 minutes.
I just clicked on "Create Ad" button above their advertisement area on the right, and immediately I am able to enter information about the ad. Maybe because I have been experimenting with AdWords already, the flow seemed pretty straightforward for me.

Facebook allows to link the ad to the Facebook page by default, or we can specify an external site.  By default, it chooses the Facebook page.  I have chosen to have them go to my specific site because ultimately I want the users to go to my site through Facebook page, so why an extra click? I can think of an advantage of linking to the Facebook page to get more of "Likes" on the page, but for my first experiment I chose the simple form.

One suggestion to anyone who is creating the ad for the first time:  before choosing around different options, you might want to save your ad and other text information such as "interest" to a notepad or somewhere else.  When selecting some of the options, those text disappeared from me which frustrated me to re-enter them again.

The second page takes to the billing page where we (of cause!) put our credit card number.    There is a little link to enter a promotion code on this second page.   You can look around for a deal for these promotion code, for my case; since this is the first advertisement that I did, I found a promotion code where I pay $6.95 for $50 credit from non-Facebook site.   They only accept PayPal, and  I was skeptic at first, but  it worked for me.  They send you a code immediately in email after payment which I type in the Facebook billing page.

This is the second day after creating my first ad, and so far I have had one click with impression of over 1000.  I will keep monitoring and see how it does.