I just ran an ad for a client who runs a Pilates Studio. They are on a rather tight budget and so I suggested we go with a Facebook Ad. The largest increase in Facebook users of late has been those who are over 30 (I forget the exact stat) so this is the perfect target audience for my client to get in front of. Since Facebook knows all the details of its users (age, sex, geographic region) as well as their general interests (choices of groups, keywords used in Wall posts, etc.) a small business is able to tailor their ad to their exact target audience.

The results thus far have been pretty good. The ad has been running for roughly a month (April 14 start date) and thus far has accounted for over 25% of traffic to the client’s website! Granted, the daily traffic to the site is rather low (roughly 7.5 visitors per day) but 2 of those come from the Facebook Ad, for a whopping $1.00 per day (the client’s desired limit)

So, in total, for those of you keeping score, that’s 256,561 impressions (meaning it shows up in the right hand column in Facebook) 59 clicks and a total ad spend of $27.31 !! Quite a value I say.

Please see the embedded image for a screen shot of the Ad admin area, which shows what the actual ad looks like. You can also see some of the targeting going on with the ad near the bottom.

Facebook Ad for local Pilates Studio - click to enlarge

Update June 17, 2009
I recently learned there is a much lower bounce rate for the ad if you link to a Facebook Page rather than linking to a website. Anyone else tested for this?

Facebook Lexicon - click to enlarge

The above chart shows that the term “band” was the most frequently mentioned in conjunction with “jazz”, while “combo” was mentioned less frequently. For SEO purposes and keyword selection, this is very useful information to have! The chart also shows me the average age for the terms “jazz + band” was 27 years old and predominantly male.

Per Facebook: “The Y axis is the average age and the X axis is the average gender of users who posted the association. For example, a bubble up and to the left means that the association is more prevalent among older and more female users. A bubble down and to the right means that the association is more prevalent among younger and more male users. The size of the bubble indicates the number of times the word appeared alongside the topic in the given time window. You can view historical trends by using the slider at the bottom of the graph.”

You can also see demographics (age, gender and country) sentiment (do people like the term) pulse (number of mentions of related terms such as music or dance) and finally maps in addition to the “associations” chart shown above.

Lexicon is intended primarily for those looking to place ads, but in the future could be used to assist with selecting keywords. I say future because as of this post the current version of Lexicon is a preview version, meaning the you cannot select your own queries but rather must select from a predefined list. You can search for terms in the old Lexicon version http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/ but there aren’t the additional data views as in the new version.

From Facebook: “In this preview version we are giving you access to a few topics we hope you will find interesting. We will add additional functionality and index many more topics in the future.”