DISQUS

Anonymous · 1 year ago

"Are SocialAds Less Effective Than* Search?"

Jonathan Kleiman · 1 year ago

grammar police?

Jason Peck · 1 year ago

It really makes sense that search performs much better than socialads ( overall). When people search for something, they're actively seeking it out, either just to get information, or to buy. They're in an entirely different mindset than when they're on Facebook. Most people go on Facebook to stalk people, look at pictures, etc, not click ads and buy things.

Sponsored search results are useful to people who are in the buying mindset, but for many people on Facebook, even the "relevant" ads are annoying and are related to what they're looking for--even if they may claim to be interested in it.

JX · 1 year ago

In all fairness, you should point out that the Facebook Ad clicks are priced approx one fourth of Google's in your example. So it's cheap. You could even try to calculate the price per conversion, and you'd see that Facebook is still cheaper than Google. I'd say that for your friend, the results are favorable for Facebook.

Anyway I wonder why everyone seems surprised by these results. Facebook (and social sites in general) has extreme amounts of page views, and opposed to searching, which is a thing you do when you know what you want, the audience isn't particularily filled with "commercial intent" (to paraphrase Greg Linden)

I think a more interesting and useful comparison would be if you compared ads on the AdSense network with social ads. The AdSense ads are placed on sites without this commercial intent, and I guess you'd see conversions and eCPM's more similar to Facebook's.

Jonathan Kleiman · 1 year ago

How about the fact that a huge percentage of people on Google were looking for what they found, whereas 100% of people on Facebook were not? Apples and oranges, I think.

Chris Kennedy · 1 year ago

JX is exactly right. These "evaluations" of Facebook advertising are usually sloppy, do not make accurate comparisons, are based on a single creative, and are run by people with little or no online advertising experience. They are generally conducted with extremely low amounts of money and over short time periods, which doesn't help either.

Marc · 1 year ago

The obvious reason for the low CTR is becuase social network users are not performing long tail searches. Social Network advertising should be in the context of what one is DOING with EACHOTHER not what they said to eachother.

Facebooks advertising options should include the following as an example to what I said above...

-User Plays Games (identifiable by how many game apps are installed)
-User Likes Photos (identifiable by photo gallery apps and qty of photos used/viewed)
-User Likes Videos (same, but with videos)
-User Likes Moderating (identifiable by how many apps theve installed that allow you to rate and mod people)

Now, with that data, a Facebook app developer can really target their adds much better, and, have a hight CTR.

markus941 · 1 year ago

@JX: Facebook CPC was higher than Google's not lower (Adwords was 16 cents, Facebook was 22 cents). FB was wildly inconsistent in how often it showed ads. I needed to increase the cost per click to get more impressions.

Plus in about 21 days Adwords received 688 clicks. Facebook only got 178 clicks over a 2 month span (even at a 22 cent average).

Also, conversion in this case only meant that they clicked out, not purchased anything.

Jason Rubenstein · 1 year ago

Nick,

Excellent post - this is a topic that deserves more research and reporting.

When I tabulate results from a statistically significant collection of data from our own campaigns, I'll send it your way.. should make for some interesting reporting.

Henry Elliss · 1 year ago

I agree with some of the guys above - I want to know what his Cost Per Acquisition worked out at, as I'm pretty sure from my rudimentary maths skills that Facebook actually works out better...

kristie · 1 year ago

How do you track Facebook conversions if you're not using Beacon?

Andrew Paradies · 1 year ago

I think that another point that hasn't been mentioned yet is that is the "click" the overall measure of a successful advertising campaign online. So far, I've seen little proof that clicks necessarily convert into sales. Moreover, as an advertiser will tell you, branding is all about the number of eyeballs who see an ad, not who directly go and purchase something. So for example, think of the difference between an ad for Tide by P&G versus when you're watching infomercials that flash an 800 number. Sure you have more direct sales resulting immediately during the time the ad is shown, but what about all of the folks who don't buy immediately. If infomercials were the best way to sell products, wouldn't all of the biggest TV advertisers would be doing it that way?