Rockin' the Facebook Ads

Considering the hubbub about Facebook ads invading user privacy, I thought I’d see what a search for “Facebook ads” returned in Google search results. Nothing anti-Facebook popped up on the first page of results. No Facebook ad competitors, either.

What did come up was an ad for Facebook ads: “Reach the exact audience you want with relevant targeted ads,” read the sponsored search result, linking to www.facebook.com/ads/.

The exact audience, eh? Well, in my spare time, I sell an item that has a very niche audience. And, indeed, it could be and has been advertised online. So, I figured I’d try an experiment advertising my punk rock cookie cookbook and electric guitar cookie cutter, Cookie Chaos!, on Facebook.

Being such a big spender, I agreed to run a text ad for the day with a $5 maximum spend on $.10/per click ads. Sure, the ads aren’t the same ones Facebook is catching all the heat for, but what the heck.

I told the system what audience I want to reach, choosing keywords to show user interests, and picking gender, age, relationship status and political persuasion. It spit out the following: “I want to reach liberal, moderate, and conservative people age 15 and older who are single, in a relationship, engaged, or married in the United States who like baking, guitar, punk, or punk rock.”

Based on who I said I wanted to reach, the system began tabulating how many users would be in that audience: 185,960. But what’s interesting is the more demographic groups I added, the fewer people in the pool. For instance, when I don’t choose “liberal,” “moderate” or “conservative,” the number of people in my target audience goes up to over 386,000.

So, I’m running the ad from now until midnight PST. I’ll keep you posted.