I had a $50 Facebook advertising credit that I got through my GoDaddy purchases last month and so today I decided to do a trial ad placement on facebook. I set up the ad placement targeting USA users over 18 years of age with “billiards” marked as their interests. Facebook’s ad system advised me that I would have an audience of roughly 30k users based on those selections.

I submitted the ad, with a maximum bid of 0.20 cents per click. (although they suggested roughly 0.55 cents per click would have been a more appropriate bid if I wanted my ads to appear – I later found that this was way high.)

My ad has been live for about 2 hours, and here are some of the statistics:

Name	Status	Max Bid ($)	Type	Imp.	Clicks	CTR (%)	Avg. CPC ($)	Avg. CPM ($)	Spent ($)
****	Running	0.20	CPC	3,600	6	0.17	0.20	0.34	1.21

Yes, you are reading correctly – thats a cool 0.17 % – thats roughly 2 tenths of 1% – for a clickthrough rate.

I’ll keep the ad live until I burn through half of the $50 credit I have. At the half way point, I’ll try tinkering with the copy a little, and maybe change the landing page. (Although the golden rule is change one thing at a time, and measure.)

Based on what I see so far, though, I really don’t think facebook advertising is really worth the money, unless you are advertising something REALLY cool for tweenies – but then again, if you product/service was really that COOL, you wouldn’t need to advertise it.

Seriously though, I’d be way better off buying an ad banner or text link on the homepage of a popular site in my site’s niche category.