Facebook Ad Click-Through Rates Are Really Pitiful
April 7, 2008 – 5:03 pmQuite by coincidence, I’ve encountered a few statistics on Facebook’s advertising platform. I thought I’d post links to the results I’ve uncovered, in case anybody is wondering about average CTR rates for Facebook.
First up, Rod Boothby got a click-through rate of 0.01%:
This week, I ran $105 worth of Facebook Fliers. That bought me 52,500 impressions. It looks like the flier bought me about an extra 500 site visits. That’s about $0.21 per hit.
Michael Ferguson ran a bunch of Facebook ads for Kinzin:
Click-through rates are abysmal. I was running the identical ad in about 15 different regions (you need to run them as separate ads to get the stats broken out), getting just over 10M views. Our average clickthrough rate was 0.06% (that’s 1 in 1513, for those counting at home). The best we did anywhere was 0.14%.
He later reports that the conversion rate was “at a pretty reasonable clip” at about 5%. By ‘conversion’, I think he’s meaning people who actually signed up for Kinzin’s free service. All of this stuff is contextual, but if visitors had to lay down money, the conversion rate would be considerably lower.
The folks at Valleywag report similarly dismal numbers:
Media buyers — the agency people who book campaigns — report that the college social network is a truly terrible target. They’re mainly students, with low disposable income, of course; but, beyond that, the users appear to be too busy leaving messages for eachother to show much interest in advertising. Facebook’s members appear indifferent even to movie advertising aimed at their demographic. Clickthrough rates, the percentage of time users click on an ad, average 0.04% — just 400 clicks in every 1m views — according to one report seen by Valleywag.
From AllFacebook:
Fred Wilson has been updating the world about his venture in Facebook advertising over the past week. Today, Fred posted and updated screenshot of his ad campaign’s performance and it doesn’t appear to be too stellar. For one of his campaigns, out of 10,080 impressions there were only 8 clicks. The average cost-per-click for Fred was $0.08 and the average CPM was $0.06. This is a less than stellar performance. This is nothing new though.
And lastly, from a digital student marketing blog in the UK. This would seem like a natural fit for Facebook’s audience:
Our most recent campaign saw 1.4 million page impressions delivered at specific universities – and only a 0.04% clickthrough rate. Ouch.
Click-through rates seem to sit around 0.04%, which is profoundly lame if you ask me. I’m no online advertising expert–it’s not really our thing–but I’ve run a bunch of Google AdWords and other contextual advertising campaigns. We regularly get click-through rates of 3%, and I gather that’s nothing special.
Here’s my theory on Facebook: it’s a silo. People visit the Fun House of Facebook, and conceptually treat it slightly different than the rest of the web. They’re in Facebook, interacting with friends, playing games, sending messages and now chatting on IM. As such, they’re really unmotivated to leave. Who wants to leave the Fun House?
We’ve seen similar results across Facebook. It’s really difficult to drive visitors out of the app and to your own website.
Tags: , Advertising, clickthrough, conversions, Facebook, marketing, rates
13 Responses to “Facebook Ad Click-Through Rates Are Really Pitiful”
I figured as much about Facebook Fliers. The concept at first is really intriguing but it appears that ROI is almost none. Thanks for listing out all those different examples.
By Elizabeth on Apr 8, 2008
I have been running ads for two of my businesses and received an average of .2-.35 click through rate. I think what the major issue is that ads aren’t targeted well enough and users are on Facebook to social network, not to click on ads.
Give them a reason to click on ads. If you want to sell products on Facebook, or Bebo, or MySpace and want to have a social web presence, register your business on Business 3.0. It’s free, and you get your business profile on three social networks (210 million users.) Check it out, my ads have been getting ‘average’ CTRs.
By Mike Z on Apr 8, 2008
I’ve had an interesting experience with social ads on Facebook. Probably due to my site’s (Protagonize.com) target market, I’ve had some success with the leads I’m getting from Facebook. While the clickthrough rates are completely pathetic (and the quality of your ad has an amazing impact on this), it’s PPC, so I’m getting super qualified traffic from Facebook. A very high percentage of all FB-driven clickthroughs result in registrations on Protagonize, as opposed to most traffic I get from other sources.
So, since I can set a very stingy daily budget, get a huge amount of exposure and get very targeted users coming through who mostly seem to sign up (many of my most frequent contributors thus far have come in via FB), I can’t really complain.
If I were paying CPM rates, I’m sure I’d be pretty choked, though.
By Nick Bouton on Apr 16, 2008
FWIW - my clickthrough rates range from 0.10 - 0.13%. Had close to 8m impressions between 3 campaigns so far.
By Nick Bouton on Apr 16, 2008
This post is great and, as usual, you’ve hit the nail on the head with your information and advice. Facebook Ads sound like a great idea, but the proof is in the pudding.
Thanks!
Maria Reyes-McDavis
By Social Media Marketing Maven on Apr 19, 2008
There is a new trend now - advertisers are taking users to their own pages within facebook. So, has this changed things? Are CTR still abysmal?
By Jaki Levy on Nov 26, 2008
If you use Facebook PPC advertisements properly you can easily obtain a high click through rate. You just have to make sure you target the right individuals on Facebook and not just all users. I’ve had great CTR through my past campaigns.
By Dave on Jan 15, 2009
Thank you. I was searching for this type of information and was happy to find it here.
I think that the CPC and CPM costs may have gone up since this was written. I am targeting 29+ “single” in Los Angeles for SingularCity.com and being charged 62 cents CPC and 44 cents CPM.
By Linda Sherman on Feb 3, 2009
I am wondering if the clicks on facebook really “works”? I got clicks but no sales. And it seems like once you place high bids, it would shoot up to like 10,000+ impression and it will surely generate few clicks. The other one is B**V***tis*r. I got clicks very very very fast but no sales. I was wondering if these PPC really works?
Would these PPC show impression but clicks but no deliver the true clicks?
By DannyBoo on Feb 7, 2009
Moving away from an off-site website to one at Facebook has changed not only the cost of running ads, but eliminating bothersome keyword selection as seen on Google. Certainly the demographics do not give an accurate insight of the client as would any normal stat counter, but who needs it. Exposure is the bottom line in advertising, not necessarily product sale. Facebook ads run en masse in mass attacks and the overall analysis is made much easier in a shorter amount of time. That way, if the product isn’t a hit, there’s no use in beating it to death.
By James Langelle on Apr 9, 2009