.jpg)
But this weekend I tried a little experiment with Facebook advertising.
I don’t mean just posting something on my pub’s Facebook wall and hoping it’ll gather enough of a conversation to drive somebody through the door, but actually paying for one of those ‘sponsored’ adverts that appears in the right hand column on a user’s Wall.
Before buying in to my pub I spent many years in the Pay-Per-Click market space, helping business monitor and analyse how their online search results were driving customers to their place of work, but the pub trade has often been loath to take up such marketing activity.
On Sunday night, we were having one of our monthly quizzes – first Sunday of every month throughout winter – and, as ever, I’d created an event on Facebook, written up the date on the blackboards above the bar, and stuck an A-board out the front.
And then I thought I’d see how easy it would be to set up a Facebook advert. The harsh reality is that I wasn’t expecting it to be fruitful, I just wanted to go through the process to see what sort of data I would have access to and then work out whether it would be valuable for future marketing campaigns.
Logging in to my account, I clicked on Create An Advert and followed a very simple, on-screen process that allowed me to set up the ad. I chose to link it to the Event that was on my Wall, which gave details of the Sunday night quiz, and told Facebook that I’d be prepared to pay up to £10 for the advert, which would be up for a total of one day.
I localised the advert, stating that I wanted it to only be shown to people registered within a 40-mile radius of my vicinity and the surrounding villages and put in a restriction that it should only be shown to people whose profile stated they liked pubs and/or beer and/or quizzes; the result was that, according to Facebook, my advert would potentially be shown to 49’900 people.
My pub can barely hold 100 people, but I shrugged, uttered a quiet “meh!” and went on to the next screen, where Facebook said that it would cost me roughly £0.45 each time somebody clicked on my advert, up to my maximum spend of £10. The Cost-Per-Click figure is based on a guideline given by Facebook; you can choose to leave it up to them, or you can set your maximum figure that you’re prepared to pay each time somebody clicks on your advert. However, doing this may reduce the chances of your advert being shown as Facebook will then favour adverts of people in similar circumstances who are prepared to spend more per click.
If you reach your maximum spend in one day, the advert will stop being shown until the following one.
In the end, the advert ran for just one day, was shown 6’021 times to 1’151 people, and two people clicked on the advert. The click through rate was a paltry 0.033% but my total spend, therefore, was a whopping eighty nine pence.
And one couple, amazingly, came to the quiz off the back of the advert, swelling the ranks of our quiz teams by an extra one, joining in the frivolity … and spending £19.84.
The numbers might be tiny, but it was a low risk that, taking in to account net profit, resulted in a nine-fold return on investment in one day. A quick and instant success that I must confess I wasn’t expecting to get – I was simply dallying about with the system in order to establish how it worked, and to possibly use for future, more valuable campaigns. I have never received such a quick and instant response from an advert I’ve placed in a local newspaper.
I’m now looking at running more Facebook ads in the run-up to Christmas. I’ll report back on how they worked in 2012…
Mark Daniels is the licensee of The Tharp Arm in Chippenham, Cambs
