How Effective Are Your Facebook Ads?

The law of large numbers impacts all marketers. Even the smallest of small businesses tells us that they post and utilize Facebook Ads because “that’s where all the people are.”

But, I tend to get a blank look when I ask “How effective are your Facebook Ads?” I mean, how do you know that they are working? And then I point out a few recent stories:

1. Avinash is a well known Google Analytics guru who likes to write about all things Marketing. He has a post that focuses on a recent story about Facebook over inflating ad metrics. Among other things, Facebook was mis-reporting how long people watched videos by up to 80%. And for large brands, it would be somewhat hard to determine if the metrics are wrong. But a small business? That gets (maybe) 50 likes on a post and a few shares? I hear small business owners bragging about how “popular” a post was, but I almost never hear the relationship between popularity and new business. Isn’t that the point of posting?
2. Here’s a great primer on how Facebook decides what shows up in your news feed. Most small businesses quickly realize that it is people that already know (and like) your business that are seeing what you’re posting. Now, that’s not terrible if you’re posting a daily special to your existing customer base. But it doesn’t translate to new customers, unless you boost a post, which is an entirely separate discussion!
3. Do you track the effectiveness of when you post? There are myriad studies about this, but nobody will know what works best for you unless you measure your own posts. This article gives you some indication of when to post, and also highlights that the half-life of a Facebook Ad is 90 minutes. That’s not a lot of time for your posts to get eyeballs. And once they are gone, they are gone forever. There is no search capability in Facebook for me to find what you’ve ever talked about like you have on the open web.

So, why do we continue to fall for the law of large numbers? Why are we not more demanding of our marketing spend? And why do we not measure anything at all?

A popular saying attributed to John Wanamaker was “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” The great news is that small businesses now have ways to better track how effective their marketing efforts are working. If you run a Google Ad or boost a Facebook post, check the analytics. Bizyhood offers deeper analytics that track actual users that interact with you. Set up custom landing pages that are only accessed from sites you are advertising with, so you can see for yourself how many clicks you are getting. Stop falling for the law of large numbers and simply advertising places simply because they have large audiences. You want to know how much of that audience is paying attention to you!