I recently ran a split test on Facebook sponsored stories and I wanted to share the results with you.
Before I do that let me explain what that means.
Using Facebook sponsored stories you can show a little advert that looks like this to friends of fans, and in that advert it will show their name saying ‘Fan’s name likes NickEllison.Net’, I’m sure you’ve seen these pop up, but from my experience, a lot of people don’t actually realise these are paid adverts!
What this mean for businesses is that you can target ads at your fans friends to get more people to like your page, all the user has to do is click the like button on the advert to become a fan. These are especially important ads now as they show on mobile unlike other ads, and as we are all addicted to our smart phones and using them for Facebook and Twitter that’s where we want our ads to show right?
Did you know that 50% off all mobile traffic in the UK is for Facebook? – CLICK HERE TO TWEET THIS
So how do I split test Facebook sponsored stories?
I set up two simple sponsored stories targeting exactly the same demographics, UK friends of fans, which at the time resulted in a target audience of 84’500 Facebook users. However I made one little change in the adverts. The first advert I ran PPC (pay per click) and the second ad I ran CPM (cost per mille, which means per 1000 impressions), when setting up the ads this is the only change I made and you do that on the objective part of your ad creation..
The results of my sponsored story Facebook ad split test
The CPM advert generated 76 clicks, the CPC generated zero results. One thing I don’t know is if Facebook gave priority to one ad over the other, the next test will be to run them at different times.
A quick note on CPC, my bid for the click was 25 pence, at the time of placing the ad the recommended bid was I believe 11-24 pence, however that does change and you’ll see from the screenshot that it rose to 15-33 pence, which will result in that ad being show slightly less.
What you can take from this split test..
Split test everything! You may think you have created the perfect ad first time, but different types of ads work for different types of people. For every ad I run for myself or clients, I run a series of the same ad with one small change at a time. That change may be the image, the wording, the demographic and so on. So for example I would run one ad and change nothing but the picture, I would then replicate that advert sometimes 10 times or more with different pictures and see which one resonates the most and gets the most clicks.
Do this with every Facebook advert that you run, split test, split test, split test!
Facebook Sponsored Stories Split Test Results - TWEET THIS
Good luck with your Facebook ads, if you have any split testing stories or tips please leave them in the comments below.
