In this previous post I looked at the the effectiveness of Microsoft Ad campaigns using a free voucher I received, and I thought that I would compare a number of pay per click advert systems (where you only pay when an advert gets clicked) to see how they compare, and I’ve been testing Facebook PPC Adverts to see how they perform.
I created a campaign based around the same test website (a small and basic health insurance advice site) using the same wording as I used in the Microsoft Advert. So how did the Facebook campaign compare?
Facebook shows relevant ads by knowing the demographic details and interests of it’s members, whereas the Microsoft system picks relevant ads based on search criteria, and from my testing the Microsoft system works much better then the Facebook system.
My Facebook ad generated 33,028 impressions but only received 8 clicks with an average cost of £0.68 per click, whereas the Microsoft ad generated 33,500 impressions and received 111 clicks with a much lower average cost per click of only £0.09.
There may be an occasion where Facebook serves a specific purpose, eg where you need to target a specific demographic, but as a pure advertising platform Facebook looks to be expensive and not as effective as other ad platforms.
