In part 1 of my case study on using Facebook Ads to promote my online eBay affiliate store, I decided to experiment with running a targeted Facebook ads campaign. The theory was that click-through and conversion would be higher for the Facebook ad clicks because the people receiving ad impressions were exactly in the demographic segment that would be most interested in purchasing my Burberry products. Go check out part 1, if you haven’t already, to see how I set up my Facebook ads campaign.

Now, for the fun part: the results.

Facebook Ads have very low click-through rates.

During the life of my campaign, approximately two weeks, my Facebook CPC campaign received 44,715 impressions, and 43 clicks. That’s a click-through rate of 0.10%. Even my lowest performing Google AdWords campaign has an all-time CTR of 0.69%, seven times the click-through of the Facebook campaign.

What surprised me is that I thought that the highly targeted Facebook audience I chose, combined with the ability to place a photo on the ad, would result in more clicks and more interest in my ad. Instead, it doesn’t even seem like my ad was noticed by anyone, even though Facebook had me excited about the fact that my ad audience would be interested in my ads through interest and demographic targeting.

Facebook doesn’t put your ads in front of engaged users.

One of the key ways to run a successful pay-per-click campaign is constant experimentation and improvement of ad copy and keywords. Since Facebook Ads didn’t send me a significant number of clicks, it made if nearly impossible to make adjustments and tweaks to try to improve the metrics. When running Google campaigns, I have the impression that if I wanted to go completely broke driving traffic to my site, I would be able to, since Google has more traffic than I can ever possibly afford. However, Facebook seems to be another story.

If you look at the graph of clicks that my ad received, for some reason the number of clicks was reasonably high (if 15 clicks is high) for the first full day of the campaign, but the traffic completely flattens as time progresses. When trying to figure out why, the only theory I could come up with is that targeting such a specific group of people who use Facebook on a regular basis means that there are only a small number individuals who will ever see your ad.

Since Google is a search utility, it’s easy to expect that lots of different people will be searching on a daily basis, but a social utility like Facebook that people check in with daily is a different story. When someone logs onto Facebook, he or she is not actively searching for something, which is Google’s key strength. If someone is looking for a Burberry purse on Google and they see your ad selling Burberry purses, you’ve found a potential (and active) match. However, if someone is checking to see what their friends are up to on Facebook and they just happen to like Burberry or purses, they are not in an active buying mode, which means your ad has to work much harder to get their attention. It’s like trying to get someone to buy a car at a family reunion, as opposed to a car dealership. This, in my opinion, is this product’s downfall.

Facebook Ads don’t drive up conversion significantly.

I would be willing to accept the lower click-through rate (after all, I’m only paying for the clicks) if the conversion rate were significantly higher for Facebook Ads than Google AdWords. However, this simply isn’t the case. In my GetBurberry.com example, a conversion means that someone who visits the site clicks on a product, which sets an eBay cookie and gives me a 7-day opportunity to earn money from their purchases.

My AdWords-driven conversions for the case study time period have an average conversion rate of 39.8% over 304 visits to my site, while my Facebook Ads campaign converted at a rate of 38.24% over 34 visits. I would consider the conversion rates to be about equal, even though Google did slightly better. The real problem with the Facebook Ads campaign was my inability to draw a large amount of traffic, but conversion-wise it seemed to be a wash in the end.

In the end, I think I’m going to continue to spend more of my time focusing on Google AdWords. That doesn’t mean that I won’t revisit Facebook to try new ad campaigns, and I also plan to continue experimenting with the free, socially-driven site promotions capabilities of Facebook, but for the amount of effort involved, it seems that Google AdWords will continue to allow me to test ideas and iterate on campaigns at a far faster rate, and in my mind, that’s what this business is all about — experimenting quickly to find out what works, and focusing on that.