They just need a quality search portal and you can imagine that Facebook may become the crucial first point of entry for many people on the web.

I just logged on and started chatting with a pal…

Haven’t read this Viral marketing document yet from Facebook but if you are using facebook pages, you may well be interested in the Facebook Pages Insider Guide to Viral Marketing.

Before I start, yes I know, a campaign is only as good as the person who has created it and I like to think by now I know how it works, so this is (in my opinion) an honest overview of Adwords effectiveness, bearing in mind the costs below don’t take into consideration my time managing them.

Anyway, Adwords. It is seemingly becoming harder and harder to justify the spend, and the temptation to spend more, on the advertising platform for some of the products I am selling.

What once seemed like the holy grail a few years ago has become saturated with advertisers, trying to outbid each other and the costs have spiralled. Add to the mix the sheer number of retailers joining the market and it is becoming a little overcrowded.

Below, is a graph of sales on one of my online shops. The average sale value is about £30-40 so every click that I am paying for needs to offer real value.

But, sales through Adwords are on the decline vs. costs. with an averaging of 40% of the sale going on Adwords. This is still profitable for me overall, but only just.

Now, I could argue that I am perhaps getting buyers come back having found the site and bookmarking it rather than buying then and there. I could also factor in repeat sales from returning customers (I also utilise opt-in e-mail marketing).

But, I have to wonder if online pay-per-click is losing it’s appeal as a viable sales route, at least for this product range, or am I missing the point?

Yahoo Adverts comes out even worse, actually costing me money to run!

My answer, and I wish I had more time to spend on applying this, is two-fold.

Content - to attract traffic. I am talking words in articles, videos on You Tube, etc. Basically, the creation of quality content that will age like a fine cheese, attracting traffic and links, raising my profile for specifics.

Social Media and Online PR - While a few people moan about Facebook and privacy issues, we are having quite good success off the back of it at a fraction of the price of Google. There is also room to spend interacting with forums, etc. And, you can’t beat a good bit of old fashion PR, sending products to people who may write about them, picking the right writers for the right audience.

Organic seems to be the way to go.

So, it’s been over a week and my Facebook advert is sending me traffic. No conversions yet though and I get different results from Facebook, than I do from my stats (see below) in terms of referrals - 60 from Facebook / 41 from Hitslink.

The only anomaly I can logically think of (away from the fact that the stats may not be accurate is that some visitors clicks back VERY quickly after clicking the advert, not giving the stats code long enough to load.

My summary so far is that despite the fact the no orders have directly converted, the spend so far is $1.39 = 68 pence - affordable for me to keep buying click-throughs. An equivalent number of clicks from Google campaigns would be in the region of £19.80 (2911% more expensive).

So, we are now just a few days into the Facebook advertising and I am getting results.

Yes, it’s very early to tell but the costs are negligible compared to something like Adwords so I am more than happy to keep this stream of traffic going for now having spent just 87 cents on 58 visitors (according to Facebook - Analytics has it at 37 and this could be people instantly clicking back before the Analytics code loads on the page).

No orders yet, but it’s got a long way to go to be costing the same as an Adword purchase.

Time spent and number of pages viewed are coming through as comparable with our Adwords Campaign (4.11 pages and 3.22 mins respectively) and the bounce rates (the percentage of people who click through then straight back again) are almost identical at 40.15% - until you factor in the different between the analytics and Facebook bringing Facebook’s bounce rate up to 62.07%.

Summary

I will stick with this for now and maybe update my findings in a month or so but my immediate reactions are that I am going to stick with this for now. The cost is so small (for now) that there isn’t really a massive downside.

It’s early days but after one evening, the first trend I am seeing is the very low click-through rate, which is to be expected.

Although it is targeted marketing in terms of advertising to a specified audience; unlike search engines pay-per-click, the adverts aren’t being asked for by the audience, so from that respect it’s still interruption and on the face of it no different, say, from advertising a product type in the adverts between a certain type of tv programme.

That said, it’s early days yet and I can see areas where this model could expand.

So, at last - social advertising on Facebook, which to my untrained eye is the same as Flyers Pro, is now live and I have just set up my first campaign for the Beauty Shop project.

To set up the adverts you need to log-in to your account and at the footer of the page, select Advertisers.

After creating your social advert, it is a very simplistic process in four steps.

1. Set Up Your Landing Page

Probably, you have a site you want to drive traffic to. Alternatively, you can set up your own page on Facebook. I didn’t do that so can’t explain the workings as I am looking to drive traffic to an e-commerce site.

It’s a simple screen though:

2. Set Up Your Audience

Again, a simple screen where you can begin to drill down your audience. You select keywords from their pre-defined lists that appear as you enter your definition, so these I’d imagine, tie in with peoples hobbies and likes, etc.

I am just going after women interested in beauty related things, rather going after a larger generic audience. Interestingly, the interface keeps you in touch with how big your audience is with every tick box selection.

3. Create Your Social Advert

You can enter 20 characters in the Title and 135 in the body. There is also the opportunity to upload a photo, or in this case a logo.

4. Set Your Budgets

Finally, you can set your budget and choose your advertising model. You can either choose to pay an amount per click through on your advert (ie. you only pay when someone clicks your advert):

Or, you can per per impression - (every time it is shown per thousand times):

5. Dashboard

Within minutes I am already getting page impressions for my adverts and I it is quick in terms of reporting. Time will tell if any of the advertising converts. I’ll keep you posted.

I checked my Facebook profile today, as you do, to notice that links to my websites have been changed to “no follow”, whereas previously before they had been ordinary links.

I actually wasn’t surprised by this until I checked a few other of my friends pages out to notice that they still have their nice links.

My Profile

Another Profile

Just me or anyone else?

.. update (1/11/07)

Seems it’s a generic update and I caught it in the middle. But, seems like a sensible shift for Facebook creating No Follow links. Good while it lasted though.

Via All Facebook comes a Compete profile for August for the social networking site of the moment. I am playing with Groups at the moment but obvsiously, people being people, the voyeuristic journey takes over.

My belief is, in terms of marketing online, creating the happy accident of discovery for your group is one part of the equation, the other being to offer members of that group a reason to stick with you, potentially buy from you, but more importantly increase the chance of more ‘happy accidents’ of discovery.

An interesting development for Facebook group as Techcrunch reports the coming introduction of being able to sort your friends into groups and send appropriate messages to them:

It shows the steady maturity of Facebook from a college network to a full on world network, where friendships, business contacts, family and other types of relationships need to be more fully described. And this is also as much about privacy as it is about organization - users will be able to limit the information that certain friend groups receive

I am trying my first foray into group messaging with Facebook today with the Truly Scrumptious Group. The owner Claire Killick (my wife) is already reporting that people are actually booking appointments by messaging her in Facebook. As the Facebook messaging becomes more comprehensive, there is every chance it could become the e-mail application of choice for many people.

Of course, it needs to fit the profile of customers. I can’t see it working for [say] a ball bearing manufacturer.

That said, with the right business model, and with the news of friends sorting, there is even more value in being able to target messages to specific groups of people, if you can sort them easily and quickly, ie. customers, prospects, suppliers, friends, etc. and, as a small business, the low cost of zero makes it a worthwhile marketing tool to explore. More to follow…