I recently experimented with running a 7-day advertising campaign for this blog on Facebook as well as the Google network using Adwords.
This was my second attempt and the results are pretty encouraging.
I mainly targeted the 20-35 age group on Facebook who are based in India with some level of education and any marital status. In the case of Google Adwords, the ads were only shown to Internet users in India where were looking for technology related websites.
First, here are the individual performance reports for AdWords and Facebook advertising:
Google Adwords (Ads were shown on Google search and sites that use AdSense)
Facebook Advertising (with a daily advertising budget of $5)
If you compare these tables, Facebook can deliver tons of impressions for a small amount of money but the average cost of visitor acquisition (CPC) is higher for Facebook than Google Adwords.
Now Google Analytics tells me that a visitor from either of these advertising networks spent anywhere between 2-3 minutes on the page which is not bad at all. The bounce rate for visitors from Google were nearly the same as the site average but in the case of Facebook, the bounce rate was 25% less than the site average.
This was just an experiment with a very low advertising budget but looking at the results, these advertising options are definitely worth exploring as they deliver if you can target the right crowd.
If you have never tried advertising with Facebook, it even allows you to target employees of a particular company or students of a particular college. For example, you may set your ad to appear only on the terminals of Google employees or students of IITs and IIMs.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/blogging/promoting-a-blog-through-facebook-advertising-and-google-adwords/3197/
Tags: advertising, adwords, Archives, facebook, Blogging, Internet
Reader Comments
What about Indians outside India? Wouldn’t they be interested in knowing whats happening around in tech part of India. In my case I certainly do. How do you target these people when their profile information says they are from different country but home country being from India.
Written by Vinay on 05.07.08
So you had created a Ad Campaign on 01-04-1930?
Facebook wasn’t even existed on 1930?
Linu
Written by Linu on 05.07.08
What people would need is clicks and thats too low with facebook advertising!
Written by Chetan on 05.07.08
Any specific reason for why only indian crowd. I thought tech stuffs are searched by people location independent.
Written by Blootics on 05.08.08
That’s an amazing level of targeting!!!
Written by Gaurav Gupta on 05.08.08
You mistyped the first date( 01-04-1930) in facebook advertising …
But a nice and useful statistics ….
Written by Deep C on 05.09.08
@ Deep C that clearly tells that Amit doesn’t even look at comments
Written by Linu on 05.09.08
Increase the cost per click to what it costs you in Facebook for Google Adwords. You are paying ~$0.06 for Google Adwords. No wonder you have so few clicks. You’re paying as much as $0.33 for Facebook. If you want a real test, try keeping the cost per click the same and see where you get more clicks… and on top of that.. analyze what those visitors do once they get to your site. Other sites i’ve seen say Google visitors have as much as 10% more likely to make a conversion. Good luck!
Written by Cody on 05.30.08
@ Linu and why will he bother about his readers when he is earning boatloads of money from his blog? Never seen a more irresponsible blogger….
Written by Nick on 07.11.08