[jrbapna]

Be careful with Facebook advertising. If you're not, you'll waste a lot of money very quickly.

Some guidelines:

1) Change your targeting to reduce fraud clicks. As an example, you can choose to target only users of your audience who use Gmail. In the U.S. at least, this works because Google makes it very difficult to set up fake accounts in mass due to phone verification. There are many other targeting options as well that will significantly reduce fraud.

2) Always use the hack mentioned by adambratt. Your posts will show much more ROI when there is social proof.

3) Focus on post quality and virality. Posts that have low interactions are just going to be difficult to show any sort of ROI. The power of Facebook is when you combine the organic WITH the paid reach. The paid helps you initially get in front of the appropriate audience, and then when your post is shared and liked it will organically show up in the newsfeed of their friends and followers. This is where the the true power of Facebook advertising lies.

Now personally, I've seen much more ROI with Google than with Facebook. Search/purchase intent is the differentiator: visitors are coming to your site with a goal in mind. With Facebook ads, however, I've run campaigns where 70% or more of the incoming traffic bounces within a few seconds. In my experience it's much more difficult to get quality traffic from FB, but far from impossible.

[GreySquall]

Thanks for chiming in. A few comments regarding your guidelines.

1) Change your targeting to reduce fraud clicks. - I did, and I actually had M, the Facebook Global Marketing Specialist, comment that my targeting was solid. If this becomes a game of guess-and-check, then that's borderline gambling. I had a pretty specific target group, and that got me nowhere.

Also, whenever FB responds with "you need to improve your targeting," I interpret that as "stop sucking, and then you'll be awesome."

2) Always use the hack mentioned by adambratt. - I incidentally tried that with one of my previous ads. No luck. Try try again?

3) Focus on post quality and virality. - This sounds like a bit of 1 and 2 put together. Again, when FB gave me this canned response, it started to sound like "stop sucking, and then you'll be awesome." My messaging was both clean and direct. Even for the Japan market (with specific targeting), I wrote IN JAPANESE "whether your on the train, at home, or in school, listen to my podcast to help you improve your English listening skills." Again, nada.

Do you have any specific anecdotes with your own business and FB advertising that you could share?

Thanks for mentioning Google, I'll research it to see how it could help me.

[jrbapna]

Hi, unfortunately I've stopped Facebook advertising altogether and have not been active in it for a while. The key takeaway I learned with marketing/advertising is that its equally an art as it is a science. It's a different mindset than what I'm used to (you could say I'm a programmer). This combination of art and science is what makes marketing effectively on platforms like FB so difficult.

I can understand your frustration with FB. I was just as frustrated when I dove in. Good luck to you.

PS: It absolutely is very close to borderline gambling / borderline day-trading. However it's NOT, and that minute difference is where the arbitrage can be found. Cheers!