The Power of Facebook Ads

According to Compete.com, Facebook has roughly 127 MILLION unique visitors per month. That’s 127,000,000 unique visitors per month. On average, people with Facebook accounts return at least 22 times per month.

According to Experian Hitwise, Facebook topped Google for the most traffic last week ending March 13, 2010. Facebook accounted for 7.07% of the US web traffic that week. Google 7.03%.

Facebook has more traffic than Google. Facebook is more engaging, because its not just a Search Engine. You are interacting with the site in many more ways than simply typing something in and looking for a result.

Facebook Ads is FAR SUPERIOR to Google Adwords. Not just because Facebook has more traffic, but for several other reasons:

1. You can put an Image next to your ad! Yes an IMAGE. And some of you still use Adwords?
2. You can target by AGE, COLLEGE, LOCATION, just to name a few. On Google, you can take an educated guess at most, on Facebook you can do a heck of a lot more like target a 22 year old college student, going to Umass Amherst that grew up in Kentucky. Google… you can, do none of that
3. Google’s Audience has been PROVEN time and time again to be of a “certain type” and in some cases may be less likely to purchase something than a visitor on other Search Engine, such as Bing. A growing demographic of older people (turning younger) are going to Bing as opposed to Google, when they are in buying mode for things such as Plane tickets.
4. You won’t get penalized or slapped for artificial reasons.

The drawbacks:

1. Facebook ads are harder to get approved. It seems that what one rep might approve another might disapprove.
2. Approval times are much slower than Adwords, usually.
3. The stats are not quite as detailed as Adwords, but they aren’t too bad.
4. If you get banned on Facebook Ads, they will also ban your personal Facebook account. Might want to consider an alternate computer/IP/account to use if you are doing risque stuff.

Stay tuned. I’m going to be posting some Facebook Ad Case Studies soon.

–Brian