Facebook is a trailblazer… its ads are not

The Reach Students blog just released an interesting article on the lackluster performance of Facebook based advertising:

“Facebook is the website du jour, but in Reach Students’ experience it delivers appalling ad clickthroughs.

We’ve run four targeted campaigns this year using its flyer ads, and each time the results have been disappointing.

Our most recent campaign saw 1.4 million page impressions delivered at specific universities – and only a 0.04% clickthrough rate. Ouch.

When we first experienced poor results earlier this year we looked carefully at creative and planning. Further experimentation saw a variety of quite different offers and creative approaches. What kept us going was the fact that others had anecdotally mentioned good returns from Facebook ads.

Yet our results did not improve.”

I think the answer is obvious here, people don’t click on banners, what makes you think they will just because it is repackaged in Facebook? However, I’m yet to see any data on the success of widgets. F8 apps provide a great opportunity to distribute apps that provide branded utility to the users. Lets face it the idea that I can target a student and NYU that likes long walks on the beach, Harry Potter, and Adidas shoes is pretty concept, but in reality it can’t by effectively executed.

  • Actually when I was at Babson we found huge success advertising on Facebook. The fact that we could target students at specific schools made all the difference. It also comes down to do you have a compelling product and is the ad creative enough to grab their attention. We all hate banner ads, but we all still look at them to. The trick is to figure out how to grab their attention enough to have them click on it.
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