Facebook advertising it’s a difficult field to navigate. People aren’t sure what to trust and what actually has any positive affect at all. Basically though, you can break it down into two categories: running ads for likes and running ads for sales. Running ads for likes is not worth it. People argue about the exact numbers, but the consensus is that anywhere from 50% to 85% of likes obtained through ads are from fake or spam profiles. On the other hand, running ads for specific products or services can be very lucrative, especially on mobile. Lets take a look at the newest round of Facebook marketing numbers and a couple of examples.
During the last quarter, mobile revenue has soared for Facebook. Mobile ads now represent a whopping 41% of the company’s total advertising revenue, and mobile users account for 71% of total active users. The mobile advertising revenue is projected to continue growing this year, possibly outstripping desktop advertising by 2014. This speculation has been reiterated by Zuckerberg himself:
“Nearly half a billion people use Facebook on their phones everyday and soon we’ll have more revenue on mobile than on desktop as well,” he said.
Currently, 1 in every 20 posts on Facebook is an advertisement. Facebook hopes to increase that number but, at the same time, decrease complaints about ads. They’re trying to do this by improving their Graph Search algorithms, which will make their targeting more precise. People rarely complain about ads if they are actually interested in the product or service being advertised. This is a smart way to go about their business, and advertisers are taking note by stepping up their Facebook marketing budgets.
“T-Mobile did an ad campaign with us to attract people to sell new phones. They used our offer ads to do it and 9 percent of the people who claimed the offer converted to T-Mobile within 10 days. They had over 20 times return on their ad spend which is just incredibly strong in the industry and I think that shows the power of what we can do with impressions, taking people all the way through the funnel,” said Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg.
So, if you haven’t tried them out yet, now is a great time to run some Facebook ads for your business. Just remember to optimize them properly and remember, never pay for likes!