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.


 

Should you be using Google AdWords for items on Ebay?

Should you be using Google AdWords for items on Ebay?

Short Answer: Depends on what you are selling. 

Long Answer:

I have been selling Shiroi Koibito Japanese Chocolate in USA and have been using EBay as primary location for the sale.  I have also being using Google AdWords to attract some more people to purchase the chocolate. But does it worth it?

I have been selling various items on EBay, and what I have noticed is that there is no need to put any advertisement if you are selling well-know items.   For example, I recently posted a DVD for Microsoft Office with a reasonable price.  Within a day, I had a first bid.  I had more than 10 bid at the end of 7 day auction without any other advertisement such as Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus.  

According to 2011 Q3 Result, EBay has 98.3 million users worldwide.  Although I was not able to find information on how many users are in USA, that is a significant number of users.  EBay pays for their advertisement so that our items are reachable to as many users/non-registered users as possible.  We are paying EBay for their large audience and their marketing they pay for our items to sell.  Great. Seems that it is a Win-win situation. 

So why do I want to pay someone else such as Google in addition to paying EBay?  The answer depends on what you are selling.  

Ninety eight million users worldwide is a significant numbers, but when it comes to targeting a specific audience; Google and Facebook has far more outer reach.  In my situation, I am selling Shiroi Koibito Japanese Chocolate, I am targeting audience who has either been to Japan or has eaten the chocolate and know that it is a really tasty chocolate worth paying $29 for 12 package.  People who have not tried the chocolate will not understand why to pay such amount for chocolate.   Well, think about Godiva Chocolate.  Godiva is very well-known for their quality chocolate, and my goodness their chocolate is good.   People pay $30 - $100 or even more for their chocolate, and if you have eaten their chocolate you know what I mean.   Now imagine you are trying to sell Godiva chocolate to the audience who has never heard of Godiva.  Do you think they will pay $100 for chocolate?  Chances are pretty small, I guess. 

I have been experimenting mixture of advertisement, and what I realized is following: for selling items that require very specific audience, eBay will not be a good place to sell such items.   Google AdWords is a very powerful tools to target specific audience by selecting keywords etc (You can read my other posts for my experience with Google AdWords).   If you are selling an item on eBay that require such specific audience, I suggest that you could combine Google AdWords to promote your items.