Facebook advertising: Is it worth it?

I’ve been doing Facebook advertising off and on for many years. There’s something that I’ve noticed over that time and I wanted to find out if what’s happened with me is common among industries.

So I found nine companies that we work with and we did a 90 day study.

We did Facebook ads across nine different industries; some had visual products, some were service industries, it was a pretty wide variety.

We did a total of 52 ads among the nine companies. We combined video, animated, image and text ads.

And I found something interesting. The image ads did way better on Instagram than they did on Facebook, but you can’t really do text ads on Instagram.

We had over 80,000 people see the ads, so we got a lot of engagement throughout the nine companies doing the ads.

But there weren’t a lot of people that liked the pages off the engagement. We got good engagement, but we didn’t get a lot of likes. And we didn’t get a lot of new followers.

But here’s the big thing that I found out doing Facebook ads for nine companies in nine different kinds of industries: not one of these companies could say that they had one new customer specifically from the ads.

Now you might say, “Yeah, but you’re doing this in the middle of COVID and all that nastiness.” But actually online is going gangbusters with COVID because nobody’s going to local shops. And all of these companies did ads based off of online stuff. Of the  82,000 people that saw the ads, not one new customer for any of the businesses.

And you might say well, maybe the ads weren’t great.

I can happily say that I did not create the ads myself, our company doesn’t do ad creation. We will market the ads, but we don’t create them. We hire a company that is dedicated to doing social media advertising, they’ve had a lot of success. They are a high profile company with a great reputation.

They got better engagement (people coming to their page and reading posts), they are getting some more likes, we had 128 new page likes total among the nine companies.

But for 82,000 people, you had 128 new likes and not one new customer.

I’m wondering if Facebook ads are worth it anymore. They used to be a little bit better. Facebook has been cracking down on a lot of stuff lately. And I think that they’re even cracking down on the ads. Because we’re talking nine companies across Facebook, 90 days’ worth of ads, several thousands of dollars being spent.

And like I said, they weren’t huge budgets, they were smaller budgets that we did on purpose. One thing that I did notice is the more money that gets spent on the ads, the more page likes we had, the more engagement we had. I know companies that spend $30-40,000 a month on Facebook ads. I know one company that spends $100,000 a month on Facebook ads.

But easy SEO and more is a podcast for smaller businesses, I’d kind of doubt that you have $100,000 a month to spend on a Facebook ad. I don’t.

And if I did, I don’t know if I would spend it on Facebook, I can think of other ways it’d be better used, but I’m going to talk about that in another podcast episode.

So think about that the next time you start doing your Facebook ads, is it really worth it? If you’re looking for engagement, or if you’re looking for page likes or more people to get to be your Facebook group, maybe it’s worth it. But if you’re looking for new customers for your business, this doesn’t seem to be the best way to get new customers anymore. Google advertising, LinkedIn advertising might be a better bet.

Of course, LinkedIn advertising is expensive, it is way more expensive than Facebook and even Google ads are. But if you’re doing business to business, then it seems to be much better engagement and more likely to get customers. If you’re doing business to consumer, selling products to consumers rather than to other businesses, maybe not. I haven’t tried that yet. But in business to business, especially service related business, you seem to have better engagement and the better prospect of finding new customers over LinkedIn than Facebook.

But again, I’ve noticed that going down as well. So maybe that’s not the best way either. Google ads and YouTube Video Ads might be a better bet.

Those can be a great source of engagement and new customers if done right. but I’m going to talk about that in another episode.

– Dr. Ty Belknap, CEO, Port Bell SEO