Facebook Flyers for Advertising… Does it Work?
Published by Rodney Rumford July 10th, 2007 in Facebook, Facebook Applications, Facebook Marketing.Rating: 
As a very basic way to advertise in facebook is by using their “Flyers” product. This product allows you to serve little ads that are shown on the side of specific pages within facebook. facebook Flyers are a self-service solution, creating localized ads that can be targeted to specific college campuses. Your facebook Flyer’s message can be all text or include a small photo (that you upload) or a graphic element that they supply.
About a month ago I decided to do some experimentation with the facebook Flyers product. This is not an application, rather it is a paid spot that you can advertise on facebook with for a specific university. I chose to run a “Stanford” Flyer for $50.00 to see what sort of response I would get. The more you spend the lower the price per Flyer impression. The impression pricing model is very basic. As an advertiser I would like to see more metrics and actual click thru performance (like with google adwords). I tend to prefer pay for performance versus pay for impressions.
It was really easy to setup and pay for the Flyer. Use your credit card, it is a piece of cake. There are some nice options for images that you can add to your Flyer. They spaced the number of Flyers served over a 24 hour period for my particular Flyer. It tracked very accurately and expired almost exactly at 24 hours. They do not tell you how many people clicked on your ad.
This type of advertising is nice for basic classifieds, event announcements, used cars, club events, etc. If your audience fits the somewhat limited “geospecific” targeting it could work quite well. It is interesting to note that you can’t use the word “facebook” in your Flyer text.
The result was as follows: $50.00 spent, 25,000 impressions, click thru traffic was negligible (less than 50 = less than 1/5th of 1%). I have no doubt that the ads were served, but writing good ad copy is a totally separate issue that effects click thru rates, and your ads need to resonate with the readers that are shown your ad. At this point I would be more inclined to use craigs list for this type of advertising.
I am sure this type of facebook advertising could work very well in some instances. Give it a shot, you can try it for as little as $10 bucks, and can be live with your ad in under 5 minutes. 
You can also check out how to advertise on facebook with their Flyers product FAQ
Preview of the ad as I built it. Super easy interface.
My receipt after easy online payment
My Flyer ad
My ad in the mini-feed. Notice the megaphone icon
Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook advertising, facebook flyers, facebook marketing
3 Responses to “Facebook Flyers for Advertising… Does it Work?”
- 1 Pingback on Jan 16th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
I tried to advertise a webinar on Facebook via the Flyers application and it flopped. I attribute the failure to three reasons:
1- I couldn’t track my impression ad campaign. Zillow.com offers impression ads at 10,000 per $10. They do a nice job at tracking the click-throughs (I actually made about $500 from my Zillow ad).
2- I don’t think the flyers show up on the profiles. It seems that the flyer app is hidden on a flyer board. This would mean that users actually had to travel to the flyer board. Not too many folks go out of their way to read advertising.
3- I was new on Facebook so I had no clue about demographics. I targeted the over 35 group. Do we use Facebook when we are over 35?
What I did like was the fact that I COULD use demographics for the ad.
Brian.
You have to consider your target market. Zillow is real estate specific so the people seeing you ad are much more predisposed to wanting that kind of information.
The fliers do not show up on profile pages. They show on multiple pages that a specific user (who fits the demographic you chose) sees on facebook.
You actually purchase a number of impressions, and facebook shows you how many impressions are being served.
Facebook needs to improve their reporting without a doubt. You can’t see click thru numbers. This is bad. It makes you feel like you are throwing money in a hole when you have no way to track it’s effectiveness.
There are millions of users over 35 years old. I happen to be one of them.