Always scouring the web for free ways to promote my web sites, I recently came across this link, netting people who sign up for Visa Business Networks $100 in Facebook Advertising Credit. Sweet! Considering I had nothing to lose, I decided to try using the money to make some Facebook Ads of my own.

Now, I had absolutely no idea how to use Facebook Ads, but I figured that messing around with it for a while might eventually give good results (especially since ad credits don’t feel like REAL money..). I decided to do two ads: One advertising my Portfolio website, and the other advertising my Etsy shop.

My Etsy Ad

I decided to create my first ad to advertise my Etsy shop. I chose a picture of my cutest item, a Kitty Girl doll, and since Facebook Ads allow awesomely specific targeting I decided to target my ad to women ages 18-30 who like “anime.” My logic was, anime chicks often like super cute things, so they might like my Kitty Girl dolls. Genius, correct?

Here’s the final ad. I decided to offer a discount to entice people into my Etsy lair:

Now, Facebook is considered by most to be one of the worst places possible for advertising. This is because people on Facebook are so absorbed in poking and slaying monsters that they don’t bother with the ads. I hoped, though, that with such targeted marketing anime chicks would still see that adorable little doll face and go ^_^ in joy, hopefully leading to a click. I was right! Overall, I got over 120 new clicks to my Etsy shop with the ad showing around 40,000 times. That might not sound like a lot, but it is a good percentage clickthough rating for an ad! I got a sale the next day in my shop as well, but they did not use my discount code so I have no idea if this sale came from the ad. For just using free credits, however, this is nice!

My Portfolio Ad

I also wanted to promote my web site. My web site front page is mostly just to show possible clients considering my work, so I wasn’t sure what I could do to entice people to actually DO something once they clicked through. This led me to start up a mailing list. Hopefully, if people clicked through the ad and liked what they saw, they could join my web site mailing list for updates and I would have some new names. So I added the mailing list (I picked Google Groups– feel free to join my list in the sidebar of this blog!) and mentioned it in the ad.

For this ad, I targeted it to men and women 22 and older who hold a position of “Art Director.” Art Director where? No idea! But I was hoping my ad would make it into view of someone looking to hire illustrators. Here’s the final ad. Since the images have to be tiny I tried to just choose a colorful cropping of a common subject–women:

I got less click-through on this one, but I was kind of expecting it as my targeted audience was much smaller. Still, I received over 50 new clicks in one day with the ad showing a bit over 30,000 times, and that’s 50 clicks I didn’t have before! Only one person joined my mailing list, but I am hoping that some art directors at least bookmarked my site.

My Conclusion

I think my ads were successful, at least for the couple days I had them running. Since I was just getting the hang of it, I used up more credits than I think would be necessary now– setting your bidding price and choosing between paying a cost per click or a cost per 1,000 shows is a game you need to get used to. At first I did cost per click, since I didn’t want to pay for the ad showing if nobody clicked, and I think that is good to start testing the waters. But eventually I noticed that I was getting multiple clicks per 1,000 views, and I think if I did it again I would pay for the views, hoping for the clicks, and pay less than half what I did. All in all though, Facebook Ads seem like a good avenue for certain marketing. I’m going to scrounge together some more free credit deals once mine are gone and keep on advertising!

FEBRUARY 8TH UPDATE: I’ve now had more time to play around with Facebook Ads, and my results are getting better and better. I now officially have at least one sale directly from the ad (the person applied the coupon code) and the new results for my most recent Etsy ad are 72,531 impressions, 147 clicks, total cost of $9.00 which is about 6 cents per click. Such an improvement from before when I was paying per click rather than per impression as I am now.  So far, definitely worth it!

(I put up an ad advertising a web host just to see about that, and so far there are NO clicks there. So I think people are much more likely to click on something like a cute product, than someone trying to sell you web space or other more boring ads. So paying per impression definitely only works in some circumstances!)