Incidentially, I’m in New York this week attending the Real Estate Connect conference; just heard a session on Facebook – facebook ads warranted a mention, one guy called them “phenomenal”, another lady (agent) said she had used them and they didn’t work for her. So horses for courses I suppose.

I checked out our Geographic targetting options for our area today in Facebook and unfortunately the Gold Coast is not listed.. Funnily though Nerang is but with only 80 people. This makes sense as it stands to reason that most people would just put their hometown as the Gold Coast rather than a suburb but not being able to select the Gold Coast is a bit crazy.

So the Gold Coast is not available but a suburb of the Gold Coast is..

I was hoping to try and capture the rest of the Gold Coast in a radius search from Nerang but when I select Nerang and a radius of 10 or 25 miles the population does not increase but if I change it to 50 miles it picks up about 900,000 people in Brisbane.

So for us at least we cannot get as good a geographic targeting as Google Adwords.

The other thing that always amazes me is the CPC that people pay on Google… and now facebook. 50 cents per click average is just way too much and yet many people pay way over the dollar.

In the past three months we have paid on average 6.46 cents per click on Google Adwords for just under 4000 clicks. The vast majority are 6c but I have some chasing appraisals and landlords so we are prepared to go a bit higher on those… not much higher mind you

You just have to optimize your ads and your landing page and have a bit of patience. If you write good ads with high CTR then google will show your ads more often. So in the beginning you are not getting lots of clicks.. but the traffic builds and builds. In the beginning we were only getting a few clicks per day day but our daily average clicks after a year is now close to 30 and are rising every week. We seem to be increasing the number of clicks about 10 to 15% per month now.

Your 6200 or so clicks cost you about $3500 whereas at just 6.46c it would cost us about $400. So unless we can optimise facebook to get the CPC rate down it is going to come down to us whether the extra $3100 investment is worth the profile building. My gut feeling is it would be hard to justify for us at that rate.

Unless the geographic targeting gets much better for our area we cant give it a test drive but I would suggest people give it a go.

On a per display basis Google Adwords certainly beats Facebook hands down every time. Google deliver at around 2 to 4% click through rate whereas Charlie gave his example of 0.029% or about 1 hundredth of the click through rate.

The reasons for this are exactly as you stated but I don’t think he was that concerned with the CTR at all.

Since this is PPC (pay per click) what I am interested in is how they compare on a click by click basis and then the quality of each of those visitors as Lisa H is talking about. Because there is no product sold on our websites this is a not so easy but you can gauge the quality of visitors by where they go on your website and what they signup for.

Using Google Analytics and setting goals and then analysing the traffic from adwords and facebook against those goals should tell us something…

(Charlie… do you use GA and do you have Goals setup that you can look at how the facebook traffic compares??)

It seems to me that one of the best benefit of such a low CTR is that Facebook ads provide you significant brand advertising for very little. If those that do click through do follow through and view property, download market reports, signup for newsletters or whatever goals you have set for your website then this is an excellent opportunity.

Charlie,

Great post.

The Facebook ad might be relevant to the Facebook profile but that doesnt mean they are interested in your product. To increase brand recognition Facebook has its place but you really cannot say its superior in any to Adwords.

It’s about quantification, not delivering ads. (Not asking that you post a figure, but) how many actual sales and dollar ROI did you get out of your $300 a month? What percentage of your marketing budget is ppc? These and other figures are what everyone should be aware of before they ever try ppc advertising. Read about inverse search at http://inversearch.blogspot.com. ROI is always 100%. We’d love your comments. Thank you.