our foray into the world of Facebook Ads

When Facebook announced the ability for companies and organizations to create their own “pages” on the network, it was something that we quickly decided was worth pursuing.  Thus was born the Hope College Admissions page on Facebook.  I knew this would be a great avenue for facilitating conversation among graduates of Hope and for providing unique content to prospective students.

When I stumbled across a $100 credit available for Facebook Ads, I knew there was some real potential there for driving traffic to our Page on Facebook.  Here’s what we came up with:

I have to admit that I have been pretty skeptical about the idea of online advertising. On too many sites is ad revenue to the driving force alongside the content I really care about. I’ve questioned whether there is a place for higher education in online advertising.

When Facebook launched its ads platform in 2007, I felt like the site had become estranged from the collegiate beauty that it once had. That being said, the ads featured on the left (now right) sidebar have been relatively unobtrusive and some have even been interesting enough for me to click on.

So we went with the program, trying our both of Facebook’s pay-per-click and pay-per-impressions models. We targeted students aged 16-18 that are in high school, and we targeted our main out of region students.  No Michigan students were included in these ads. The first two rows of data in the following table were our main tests; #3 and #4 were simply used to burn our remaining ad credit:

We are pleased with the results, and during the time the ads were running, this was our growth in terms of fans of the Hope Admissions Page on Facebook:

We nearly doubled our fanbase while the ads were running.  It most likely wasn’t all due to the campaigns, but there must be some kind of correlation there.

A key feature to the success of Facebook Ads is the social nature of the site. Students see what pages their friends have become fans of and it encourages them to click through to those sites as well.  I’m not sure what we’ll do with these in the future, but if we had $5.00 to budget each day for ads, it might be well worth the money. If even one student were influenced to apply/enroll based on a Facebook Ad, it would definitely pay for itself.