Facebook is a literal advertisers dream platform. The biggest reason for that is the amount of demographic information that is collected on the average user. That combined with the ability to target audiences to whom your ads are displayed.
Imagine that you are a retail store owner who specializes in left-handed golf clubs for women. Now think about how effective a radio or television ad would be in your local marketplace. Aside from radio and TV being extraordinarily expensive, the number of female left-handed golfers in your local area are likely very low. If you figure your cost per view you'll see that your spending lots of money on each viewer who fits your target market.
Let's say that your 30 sec spot costs you $5000, and your trade area has a total population of 50,000 people. So at first glance, it looks like you are paying $.10 per view. Which is technically, exactly true. But we know statistically that just a bit more than 50% of the general population are female. To make things easy for the math, we'll just use 50%. Doing some quick, simple math, that means that with the first target option of 'women' that our effective ad cost per view is now 20 cents per view, because we want to reach females.
Now let's add the next qualifier of 'golfer' to the mix. If we do a little research, we'll find that their are just about 25 million golfers in the USA. That puts the number of golfers per 50,000 people at approximately 3789, which we'll round to 4000 to make the math easier. So, now we see that our target audience is shrunk down to just 2000, because there are, on average, only 4000 golfers per 50,000 and only half of those (at most) are women. That leaves us with an effective cost per view of our target audience with two criteria applied of $2.50 each. That's 25 times more expensive than we first calculated.
OK, get ready to have your mind blown, because you about to see just how crazy expensive the effective cost of advertising can get. Let us now add 'left-handed' into the mix. Current numbers indicate that only 10% of the population is left-handed. So by extension, only 10% of our audience target audience would be left handed. That reduces our target market to just 200 for which we paid $5000 or a whopping $25 per person. And that was just for them to see the ad, not to interact with it in any way.
Let's compare that to what we can do with Facebook and its ad targeting capabilities. If we had that same $5000 to spend, what do you think would happen. Well, first you have to consider all of the criteria that you can use to decide who views your ads.
You can choose to include or exclude Facebook users from your 'audience' based on the following broad categories:
- Location (where they live)
- Demographics (age, gender, education, job title, etc.)
- Interests (organic food to action movies to tennis or golf)
- Behavior (purchases, type of device they use, posts they like, etc.)
- Connections (if they are connected to you page or event or group you've started)
So instead of showing our TV ad to 50,000 people for $5000, where 49,800 of them are never going to even think about buying something from us, we can show our Facebook ad to the only 200 people who have any chance of buying something from us. On top of that, we don't even pay for them to view our ad. We only pay when they click on it to view our offer. That action can cost anywhere from and average of $.50 to a dollar or two.
Conservatively, if we chose the highest per click cost at $2 and if all of the audience clicked our ad, we would have spent about $400. That gives us a savings of $4600. And that's just some of the capabilities of what you can do with Facebook advertising.
If you aren't a Facebook ad expert, don't worry, we can handle all that for you. Just use the quote form on the right to get in touch.
