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
22 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
Those impressions are for free. So why don’t you maximize the use of it? If people are not clicking, it won’t cost you anything.
By Bryan on Sep 2, 2009
I ran into this post searching for the “average” CTR for Facebook ads, as I was worried by the really poor performance of my campaign (CTR of 0.1%). It’s quite comforting to see that I’m not the only one with these types of figures.
Now, I really don’t know how to improve my ad so that it gets more clicks. I tested different pictures, different titles… and I always get a very low CTR.
By Aurelia on Sep 22, 2009
I ran my first Facebook campaign this past week, here are the stats
Impressions: 146,112
CTR: .242
avg cpc: .14
avg cpm:.33
As I play with the photos & keyword selection I will keep you posted!
By Antonio Esteves on Oct 23, 2009
While the CTR on Facebook ads are certainly lower, I am still able get a decent click thru rate. Here are the stats from one day of one of my better campaigns:
Impressions: 5,937
Clicks: 88
CTR: 1.48%
Avg CPC: $0.19
Notice how low the impressions are…this because the ads are SUPER targeted. You can’t just say you want to advertise to “College Students” in such and such an area. You have to target college students who watch Naruto and then have an ad that uses an inside joke from Naruto to let them know that this ad was for them. The campaign above was directly targeted to the Steampunk demographic (a good ‘target’ because Steampunk people like to reference themselves with that word on their Facebook page). I did another ad targeted to fans of Firefly where I used an inside reference to Firefly to generate interest in the ad.
However, since I was looking to generate interest in a higher priced niche product, the conversion rate was rather low. If I don’t include my COGS then the ad barely paid for itself.
So, while I stopped advertising on Facebook for my business, I’ve learned about what works on Facebook and what doesn’t.
By Connor Ferster on Jan 8, 2010
Here is my story. Yes CPC is high, yes CTR is low, yes ads are not as lucrative as they sound like. But I spend $25 a day, @ .45 to .50 CPC I get 50-60 clicks, I generate 6-8 leads.Out of every 17-18 leads that I talk to, I make a sale of $450 out of which my total profit is 300 ($50 advertising cost, $100 cost of product). With my model, FB ads make perfect sense. When I spend $50 a day, I make $300 that day. When I spend $200 in one day, I make 1200 that day. However you have to remember, I generate these leads and then I get on the phone with them. I also happen to be good at phone sales. The ones who cant afford the 450, I let them pay in 3 monthly payments with their credit card on file. If you want to make money with FB ads, you have to come up with the business model that makes sense. FB advertising is not for every business model:) Here’s the funny part……….. I have tried google and yahoo ads and the ROI made less sense for me than FB Ads. Good Luck to all.
By AJ on Jan 20, 2010
Anyone have new numbers? This is all ancient history in internet time. The only searches that I’ve been finding are posts from people not happy with their %s. Would love to hear from someone getting good numbers.
By CGB on Mar 14, 2010