The Surprising Results I Found When Reviewing a Special Report In Facebook
Have you ever used Facebook for an advertising campaign? I have quite a few times.
I’ve used them especially to advertise large and important events/sermon series that we do at church. One of the reasons why I enjoy Facebook advertising vs. Google Adwords advertising, is because you can drill down to reach a very specific demographic. Notice the kinds of ads that you receive while on Facebook. Do you find that they’re tailored to meet your interests well? I find they fit me pretty well.
I recently read this post entitled “One Killer Tactic To Boost Your Facebook Ad Performance,” which gave some more specific tactics to add to your next campaign so you can better reach people.
The author says:
“The key to improving the effectiveness of your ad campaigns is looking at what demographics are responding the most and go after them. By increasing your ad’s click through rate you will not only increase your campaign’s performance but also reduce the overall cost.
He then does a walk-through of how to open up the demographic report, which is related to the campaign, and shows you what information you should be looking at.
I decided I’d follow along. Having done a few campaigns before, I was quite curious as to how effectively they had performed and the kind of demographic I was reaching. To put it simply, I was hugely surprised by the results.
Check out the screenshot below:
Screenshot of a Facebook ad campaign I did
So what was the demographic I was reaching the most in this campaign? Apparently it was 18-24 year old women, followed by 13-17 year old women. What?! To give that some context, I’m going to show you the graphic that I used for that series:
By using the type of graphic that we used I was fully expecting to get a certain demographic of men. And for some reason I assumed that it would be a demographic in the 30′s-50′s. I was wrong on both points, though. In fact, what was really interesting, is that women took up the top four demographic categories. So women between the ages of 13-44 totaled 55.19% of all click-throughs. At first glance this may seem obvious. One could think, “well, of course. Women are half the population, so it would make sense.” But as I went further down the report, I realized that the remaining demographic categories represented tiny percentages. For example, men between the ages of 19-24 represented just 9% of click-throughs compared to almost 20% for women in the same age range. And men between the ages of 35-44 represented just 3.7% of the total, compared to 10.3% for women in the same age category. Wow.
So what do I take away from all of this?
1. I know that women are much more attracted to this ad than men. So if my goal was to reach women, I could have saved money on the campaign by targeting just women.
2. If I want to reach men for the same series, I could save money by dumping the category above 45. They barely clicked through at all.
3. If I really wanted to reach men, though, I would use a different graphic. Overall, this graphic didn’t do a good job of reaching men.
So what can I say? I think this is some fascinating stuff. So next time you’re going to do a Facebook ad campaign, always make sure to go over the demographic report afterwards and analyze it. That way, the next time you use the same ad, you can save more money and be more effective.
What stood out to you? Have you done a Facebook ad campaign before? Anything surprise you?
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It is interesting how each of us have different ideas of how our artwork will pull people in but really, until you actually test it in the real world, you are only guessing.
I’ll offer my two cents Rodlie… If you want to reach men you need to appeal to their sense of adventure, to courage, to challenges, to persecution, to injustice towards women and children. Men want to be the heroes… We men train for that from the time we are old enough to walk and talk.
One of the beautiful things about the internet is that you can very precisely see how your advertising is performing unlike in the bricks and mortar world… Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I am going to look into doing some Facebook advertising myself.
I wasn’t just trying to reach men. I thought just thought it would be a little more evenly split between men and women. Yeah, it’s nice to be able to g back and dig through the data. Quite, quite helpful. Thanks for your thoughts, Joe.
Hey Rodlie! Being that my undergrad is in business with a major in marketing it doesn’t surprise me considering your method of advertising. FB is mostly used by the younger generation, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more women than men on it. You should see if you can get stats of FB’s demographics.
And I agree with Joe (hi Joe!) – modernize it a bit (the housewife looks straight out of the 50′s), throw a soldier on it, and I think your stats will change. Good luck with the series! And by the way, how’d your conversation with Watts go?
Hahahah! Thanks, Elana. We were actually trying to go with a faux dramatic and campy look with the 50′s lady….yeah, i’m sure if i did put some guns on there the guys would be all over that. Either that or some hot chick.
I actually haven’t been able to connect with Watts yet. We’ve been playing long-term phone tag!
Thank you. This post gave me new interesting information. Haven’t done advertising on Facebook before, but was wondering how it works.
Hey Alexander! Yeah, try it out sometime and let us know how it works for you. I’ve used them for several campaigns in the past.