Is it worth it to sponsor a Facebook post?

I work in advertising. I’ve known about Facebook’s sponsored post product for a while, but I’ve never really given it much thought. Last weekend I figured I’d give it a shot and see how it went. I posted a link to my write-up of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to Facebook with this ad copy:

 

Probably not the best creative, but good enough for a test post like this.

Buying the ad was really simple. I simply clicked “Promote” and Facebook charged my credit card $6.99. I got no choices about whom my ad would be served to or what metrics I was trying to optimize.

In fact, I got almost zero performance reporting. By clicking on the word “Sponsored,” I get a drop down that sows me just a little bit of information:

 

You’ll notice that because I don’t know how many people viewed my post organically, I don’t have any idea how many impressions my ad got. I guess it helps that I know I got 9.1 times as many impressions, but honestly I have no way to know if Facebook is just making up numbers about my ad.

 

 

Except that I do. Let’s check out performance from my blog:

 

I posted the review and the ad on November 3rd. I posted another link on November 7th, so we’ll disregard that for now. Each day’s views include not only clicks from Facebook, but organic visits and internal clicks. November 3rd had 5 clicks from Facebook:

 

Of the 5 people who clicked through from facebook, it looks like I got another 5 internal clicks.

The stats for the next few days are much lower.

On November 4th, I got one click to The Spy Who …, but it wasn’t referred by Facebook. There’s two ways I can interpret that. Maybe someone bookmarked the page and came back to it (that’s what I think happened), or maybe someone clicked from Facebook but had referrer links turned off (this would be the case if the reader was technically and security minded). It’s only one view, so in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter.

November 5th had 3 clicks to The Spy Who and zero Facebook clicks again. Same interpretation as above.

 

It is pretty odd that I’m getting so much organic traffic to this one page. That suggests that it’s being shared outside of FB.

November 6th had one more click from Facebook.

 

So in total, I got 6 clicks from Facebook, plus another 5 clicks that may or may not be attributable to Facebook (post impression views, shares, and the like). Overall, those stats aren’t looking very good. Remember, I spent $6.99 on this ad, so I’m looking at $1.17 cost per click. I don’t know if a click to my blog is worth $1.17 to me. If I include the 5 additional clicks (not really a valid way to analyze this, but let’s give FB the benefit of the doubt), my CPC drops to $0.64, which is pretty good.

Still, I only have 6 confirmed clicks from Facebook, and that’s not too great. I post almost every blog post to Facebook, so I should have some baseline level of organic traffic that the ad boosted. Let’s take a look at that:

 

On November 7th I wrote a new post about Call for the Dead, and I posted the link to Facebook. I did not promote this post.

My organic Facebook traffic was 3 clicks on the first day. I haven’t had any traffic since that first day, so I think it’s safe to say that I won’t get any more traffic from that post. So, I spent $7 on promoting my FB post and I got 3 extra link clicks from it. Definitely not a good return on my investment.

Here’s the thing: Facebook is really good at ads. If I had actually bought the ads through ad manager, I would have had a lot more options, much better reporting, and probably could have gotten way more traffic. So why does Facebook promote posts the way it does?

 

I think promoted posts are an educational tool.

I think Facebook is trying to educate their users about how ads work. A lot of people see ads on their Facebook feed and wonder why they see them or if their privacy is being violated. I think the promoted posts product is designed to help people see the ads process from beginning to end. Remember the ad description, “Promoted posts stay higher in the news feed …” it seems like they’re trying to reinforce that ads are served to people who would already see that content and, presumably, make people more comfortable seeing ads in their news feed. This is important if they’re going to launch products like news feed video ads.

 

Overall, if you’re looking to promote something on Facebook, do it the right way and buy it through ads manager. Promoting posts is simple and easy, but the performance isn’t there to justify the cost.

I know this post is a little different from my normal fare. Back to book reports next week.