There’s some buzz today about the ineffectiveness of Facebook flyer ads.

I wanted to chime in because Homestead has had some experience with it as well, and we found the similar issues, but it’s not all bad news.

We ran recruiting campaigns during the height of recruiting season to local colleges here (Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Clara), schools where a lot of our employees come from.  To keep things fresh, we ran different pictures to see which would capture the most clicks and resumes.  And to save money (of course), we bought the ads using alumni accounts from each of the schools (getting the rate of 10,000 impressions for $5).  And we did the most targeting that Facebook allows; we set the ads to be run to students (as opposed to “Everyone”, assuming that alum have jobs already).

We didn’t spend much on the test ($315 for 630,000 impressions), but that should be enough for a decent test. And the results weren’t great:

Our best return was from Stanford, where we got a whopping 207 clicks from 270,000 impressions, or 0.077%.  That’s almost twice as much as Valleywag is seeing, but it’s still not great.  Do the math, and you get a CPC of $0.65.

A CPC of $0.65 is really not that bad, in the grand scheme of things. There are a few things to keep in mind.

• If you’re not a member of the school/community your advertising on, the price shoots up four-fold to $10/5,000 impressions, meaning your CPC would be a miserable $2.60.
• Use a decent picture at the top of your Flyer, something that will stand out.  If you take a look at the Flyer board for your network, a lot of the Flyers are just text, or have bland images.