OK, I’ll let you know right from the beginning that this is not a very scientific study. The goal was simply to get a few extra business page Likes on Facebook, while testing out the “Page Likes” advertising feature.
So I clicked the Create Ad button and selected the Pages Likes option that you can see to the right.
After choosing the business page I was given the option to select up to 6 different images to create more ads. I decided to go with 5 different images.
Then I selected a headline and text for the ad, followed by choosing an audience.
I set the bidding at $5 per day and let the ads run for almost 4 days.
Here’s what happened. Out of those 5 ads, Facebook picked one of them to show 794 times. The most that any of the others was shown was 63 times.
Perhaps they somehow determined that this would be the best ad. But I’m not sure, since the cost per 1,000 views of this ad was the most expensive.
It turns out that this ad received 13 clicks which resulted in 8 Page Likes. This ad cost $16.47, so the cost per Like was $2.05. The other ads did not get any clicks or likes, but they did add some cost. My total expense was $18.66. That means I really paid $2.33 per Like.
But then I tried something else. Instead of creating an ad, I decided to promote the page. There is a “Promote Page” button in the upper right area of the Facebook business page. So I clicked it.
A window popped up. It didn’t give me as many options as the Ad Manager, just allowing me to select the audience by region, interests, age and gender. Then I could set my daily budget. Once again I chose $5 per day.
How did this turn out? I let this ad run for three full days, spending exactly $15. In that time the ad reached 807. That’s 149 fewer viewers than the previous ads. Yet, it resulted in a much greater click through rate, and gleaned 21 Page Likes.
It turns out that this method cost me only $0.71 per Like. That seems like a much more reasonable price.
Of course to make this more scientific, I should try to create an ad in the Ad Manager that equates as closely as possible to the promoted ad. Then I should run them simultaneously so that I can properly test the results for statistical significance.
But I didn’t do that her. Still, with the results of the two tests being so different from one another, it does make me think that the Promoted Page is the way to go.
(Be sure to Like this page with the button up and to the left. I would also welcome you to visit www.facebook.com/upatdawnllc and Like that page too.)
