DISQUS

Michael Pratt · 2 years ago

Nick - I have been experimenting with pages and ads since the day they were introduced to promote and start discussion on my company www.giftgirl.com. The results are mixed at best. 1st Issue: technology. FB seems to think I have 2 pages and when I try to edit the "phantom" page it takes me to my personal page. FB support acknowledged this as a bug. I think it may directly be leading to other issues. I started running ads on Nov 07 and got a fair number of clicks when all of a sudden they dropped to single digits on the 16th. No explanation of why, etc I upped the bid, nothing. I then upped it to a ridiculous amount to experiment. Nothing. What changed? ( i do realize I could have just been way ahead of the curve and been the only one running ads! 2nd issue: management: You can't modify your ads, you must create a new one. bad. Graphs are on a week by week basis in the table. Why not allow for a longer time period? On a final note: They do a horrible job at telling you how to go about using pages vs groups. Should you post items? Should you post notes? Is there a way to put things on your fans' news feeds (perhaps with an opt out option so companies don't end up spamming) I created a fictional fb member to test what gets posted by my company page so I didn't annoy my fans and actually could tell how my actions looked as I posted them and I gotta tell you it's not obvious the best way to provide value to your fan base. The last thing I want is for the page to end up like a group....something that users join for status then blow off. Good article, Thanks - Mike

Jon Nichols · 2 years ago

I have actually been having some pretty good experiences with SocialAds, although I might be in a unique position. I've run a number of ads for different products, and the CTRs have varied dramatically. From what I've seen, it all comes down to how targetable is your ad. Ads for the Stitchbook app (http://apps.facebook.com/stitchbook) have had really solid clickthrough rates - today overall I'm at 1.36% and am not paying very high CPC. But ads for more general subjects (a site related to storytelling for example) had much lower CTRs. I agree with Michael that the system is still pretty bad... my biggest gripe is that I can't create an ad that targets multiple countries; I have to recreate the ad for each country. That's fine for the US, Canada, and UK, but I'm not even bothering with the smaller countries, simply because it's more work right now than it's worth. I get a sense that the whole system was rushed out, which, isn't so bad necessarily, it's just that there isn't good support, not even someone to read and answer forums. I suspect that's one of the reasons why Pages hasn't been heavily promoted... they put it out as beta (without calling it so), and are allowing time for the bugs to get worked out and to learn more about what people want. I don't think that's such a bad approach, but it doesn't seem like the support task is being taken seriously enough.