Vincent H. Clarke   Mar 14 2013   Flag

We've had a pretty decent experience with Facebook overall as a SMB, but the advertising options always seemed overpriced and a bad value. Due to a slight dip in traffic in the last week, we decided to run some Facebook ads to help a little with traffic and we ended up with a surprising amount of well-converting traffic from it. It wasn't a news feed ad!

As far as I'm concerned, if you know your demographic and they use Facebook, Facebook advertising can be a pretty big win.

Silicon Beach   Mar 14 2013   Flag

Hi Vincent, thanks for the comment.

Definitely agree that FB ads can be extremely useful for some businesses, but we felt it was important to highlight the bad experience that we had with them ourselves.

We're going to be looking into other advertising avenues in the future so that we can make a more thorough assessment of the true ROI for each.

Most of all though, as mentioned in the post, we really don't want to be alienating any potential clients and currently it seems with Facebook ads you are running that risk - will be interesting to see if this changes with the redesign.

Again thanks for the comment :) 

^Jackson

Chris Marsh   Mar 14 2013   Flag

Nice post.

I once met a girl (in marketing) who said she wouldn't use a service because they were advertising in her FB news feed. 

I was really suprised by this, but your survey suggests alot of people feel this way, which I wouldn't of expected. (and personally I'd prefer targeted ads than non-targeted.)

Frank Strong   Mar 14 2013   Flag

The data is interesting, but I've advertised on Facebook and noticed that sponsored posts work while the side bar ads have not.  I've targeted sidebar ads by region and topic in an effort to reach a specific audience. 

Silicon Beach   Mar 15 2013   Flag

Hi Chris thanks for the comment, 

We've heard quite a few stories from people who refuse to buy a product or use a service from companies whose advert appears in the news feed, but whether that stretches to boycotting most of the major corporations (McDonalds and Coke for example) is not clear.

Targeted ads were slightly more popular but we noticed a lot of general anti-ad sentiment (targeted ones included).

Frank, we too have had some real success with news feed ads in the past but it seems that there is a growing disenchantment with ads on FB on the whole.

We may have to spend more time thinking about targeting than before - something that big companies probably give little thought to whatsoever: coke ads will appear in almost everyone's feed at some point.

It's definitely some food for thought though.

Thanks for the comment :)

Jackson

Silicon Beach   Mar 15 2013   Flag

Just an additional comment here, check out Hubspot's Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/hubspot 

People are leaving very negative comments on the page itself, and the comments on sponsored posts are even worse! I.e. https://www.facebook.com/hubspot/posts/120593254793847

Here's a good article on why this is terrible for Hubspot - http://www.jonloomer.com/2012/11/25/facebook-promoted-posts-abuse/

TLDR; Hubspot promotes content, receives hides/ spam reports, their normal posts receive fewer views due to the negative feedback, they advertise more to make up for this, their normal posts receive even fewer views. The circle goes on!

Craig
SBT