My Facebook Ad

Thanks to everyone who commented and emailed me after my post yesterday afternoon. I am indeed dense. The social advertising system on Facebook is up and running, I just couldn’t find it.

Here is my ad. It took me all of a minute or two to create it. I am targeting it at facebook users who have an interest in technology. If you click on the ad, you go to the Union Square Ventures facebook page. I am paying $0.10 for each click and have a cap of $10/day. That is similar to the rates I pay on Google adwords for my avc blog ads.

Just to be clear, I don’t really see the value in running Facebook ads for the Union Square Ventures page on Facebook or Google ads for my blog. But I don’t understand technology by reading about it. I understand technology by using it.

Facebook says that there are 17,291,140 people who will see ads on Facebook. The only targeting they apply to get that number is 18 years and older. That’s an interesting number in its own right.

When you add targeting, the number of people you’ll reach goes down. I added the keyword technology to my campaign and the size of the audience I can reach dropped to 32,140 people. That’s way less than the number of unique visitors that this blog sees every month.

I wonder how the keywords are mapped to pages. I just added the word technology to my personal interests in my profile to see if that would target my ad to me. It did not.

You can also use a Facebook ad to send traffic to pages outside of Facebook. I am going to set up an identical ad to see how that performs versus driving traffic to Facebook pages.

I think this advertising system on Facebook has great promise. It would be even better if there is an API into the system so that third party advertising systems (like Clickable) could be used to purchase and target Facebook ads. It would also be interesting if I could run Facebook ads on my blog like I run adsense. I suspect all of that is coming if it isn’t here already.