As part of the Digital Avenger work we have been doing we decided to look at trying to attract people to one of our UK Challenge Events, Three Peaks .

We set up a page which can be seen at http://www.MySpace.com/deafchildren

The aim was to attract friends who had an interest in walking, hiking or outdoor events.

Ultimately we would then send them to a landing page where they can then enquire about the event.

As we have been using members of staff for the project I thought it better to have them tell it how it was from their perspective, with a few prompting questions from me. Thanks to Kathy for her Co-operation…

——

Ross: Have you used MySpace before?

Kathy: No, only Facebook and Bebo

Ross: How easy was it to set up?

Kathy: With help at the beginning it was pretty easy to set up. The basic page was a bit dull so it took a bit of time to add the extras like the video and images.

Ross: So you learnt some new skills then?

Kathy: To make the pages more interesting it was useful to have some basic html, which with Madhava and Kevin’s help and some digging online I was able to do.

Ross: How many Friends do you have?

Kathy: At last count 411

Ross: That’s good! Isn’t it?

Kathy: Oh no, its now 410 (as she looks at the MySpace page!)

Ross: Will have to look into that and see how good 411 oh 410 is. How did you get those friends?

Kathy: We used a program to collect friends. It is called Stealth Friend Bomber .

Ross: What did you do?

Kathy: We would search on Google and MySpace Groups to look for people interested in walking, hiking and outdoor pursuits. Then send them a request to check out our profile and sign on as a friend.

Ross: Were there any problems?

Kathy: Yes, I would manually have to go through my ‘Friends’ and find the UK profiles before sending out event invitations, as a number of them were American or European.

Ross: What would you like to do moving forward?

Kathy: It would be great to get a few of the people who did the event this year to either join the group or perhaps give us a quote that we can use. Also I would like to have more contact with the marketing team and get information to send out to our 410 people signed up.

Ross: Thanks

—–

Success/Learning

Some interesting questions that came out of this…

Is 410 good? Please let us know…

What should we be doing to a) keep these people interested and b) look at new avenues to collect more friends from MySpace?

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

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.