There’s a lot of discussion over whether or not Facebook ads work after GM pulled their ads. Here’s our two cents:
It all comes down to what you define as an ad “working.”
Facebook ads tend to be very good at gathering more “likes” for a page; the ads are terrible at directly converting a Facebook user into a buyer. This goes back to the mindset of people on Facebook. They are not browsing the newsfeed with their credit cards in-hand.
How to make it “work”
In our eyes, Facebook ads serve one purpose…to drive people to a page in order to engage them. On that page it then becomes the brand’s responsibility of building a loyalty community or at least one that pays attention.
Remember that the overwhelming majority of activity takes place on the newsfeed. So, the first thing you want to do is get people to see you in their newsfeed. By purchasing ads, you increase the likelihood that Facebook will place you in your fan’s newsfeed…it’s their moderately shady pay-to-place incentive to buy ads. So if you want to drive sales with Facebook ads, you need to go out one additional level.
It looks like this:
You buy an ad, drive people to your page, give them reason to “Like” your page and then you have two options.
1) get them to sign up for email newsletters on Facebook
2) Engage them through the newsfeed, give them a call to action that drives them to the website, have them sign up for emails or contact you directly.
The point here is this, you don’t close the sale on Facebook and you don’t capture people in a buying decision through Facebook ads…the best you can hope for is that people opt-in to your Facebook page to hear more from you.
To be sure it’s working, you’ll need a CRM that can track likes that came from the ad campaign. If you don’t know what people came via the ads and eventually made a purchase, you’l never know about the effectiveness of Facebook ads.
If your Facebook ad strategy doesn’t follow this format or something like it, you probably aren’t seeing results.