As part of the work we have done with the Digital Avengers we looked at testing Facebook adverts V Google Adwords.
The Challenge
To see which advertising medium would produce the most number of enquiries.
How we we went about it
Over a three week period we decided to use one of our Running Events, The Royal Parks Half marathon.
The adverts used include:
Facebook
With both adverts the user went to the same landing page. From there the user was able to enquire about the event and have relevant information sent to them.
What we found out from the test
Overall Facebook beat Google for enquiries!
Results of enquiries made during the three week period
| Totals |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Google |
6 |
3 |
2 |
3 |
14 |
6 |
34 |
| Facebook |
7 |
19 |
7 |
8 |
3 |
0 |
44 |
Facebook advert content
We found that the advert with the cartoon face on it had a greater response rate with over 370 people clicking on the cartoon in comparison to 5 with the sensible advert. CTR being 0.10% for the cartoon advert in comparison to 0.03% for the normal advert.
Questions
Some of the questions we now need to ask ourselves moving forward include:
Enquiries are all well and good but what really matters is who says yes to signing up to the event and wants to raise money for NDCS. How many of those who inquired went on to do the event?
Is this a valid test? Should we compare an advert on someone’s page with the targeted advertising from Google? Is the Facebook advert more of a banner or affiliate advert?
What effect would changing the wording in the landing page have with enquiries?
Further writing about the Facebook V Google phenomenon
The first is Jonathan Mendez’s blog , who looked at comparing Facebook and Google. In summary, his findings were that with the Facebook adverts, the time spent on the site was less. Ultimately he questioned the back end mechanisms and here I agree that they are light years behind Google and do have to catch up. I still wonder about the user journey with his experiment, we were clear that the journey for the user was to go to the landing page get a taste of what we were offering and then enquire for more information. Allowing the user to visit your site is great but if there is no focus then what do you expect?
Another article that seems to question Facebook’s validity for adverts is AU Interactive with it’s Facebook Ads Don’t Work. Here’s Proof. Again I think that the comments are interesting with suggestions such as “Targeting ads based on what people are searching for is safe. Sneaking a recommendation into a users news feed hoping they will share it with their friends, not so much.” is interesting when we look at this comparison.
A great suggestion from Slightly Shady SEO has them asking Facebook to lighten up a bit…
Final thoughts…
I’m not totally convinced I have an answer to the test we did, I think there are variables that need to be tested further, such as having the same advert! Looking at this from a neutral perspective, there is definately something in Facebook advertising and I look forward to reporting back on this once we have looked at testing the questions above further.
I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this and any other issues we might want to test.
