Facebook ad confusion
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008I placed an ad on facebook for 10 days to run from July 15th to July25th. I specified that I would pay 1 Dollar for a Click and that the maximum I would pay per day would be 10 Dollars.
There were a few differences in the number of clicks when I compared Facebook ad details to Google analytics so I went investigating.
Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the logs from Blacknight to allow for a third source of data, logs are kept only for 5 days. If I advertise again on Facebook, Ill include my own scripts to log traffic data too.
A chart of the Ad clicks according to Facebook ad manager and Google Analytics.
According to Facebook Ad manager, the ad was clicked on 66 times. The ad ended on the 25th but it tells me the ad was still clicked on on the 26th which is nice.
The numbers in red show the days where Facebook ad manager and Google Analytics disagree about the number of clicks and visits. 8 of the overall 13 days for a 10 day ad campaign show different numbers
On the 15th, my site was changing hosting over to Blacknight so that probably explains the difference of 3 visits that day. The site may not have loaded correctly for the user that day and so Google probably didn’t record the visits properly.
On the 26th and 27th, I don’t know why Facebook still had the ad going on the 26th, I got charged for it which went over the free 100 dollars I gots from the VISA application and my credit card was charged accordingly.
Facebook charge of €13.21 on AIB 24 Hour banking
According to Google, I received 2 referrals from Facebook on 26th and 27th. Based on a comment from John O’Connor that never occurred to me, most likely the 2 referrals on the 27th is a result of 4 visitors on the 26th and they didn’t navigate away from the site or close the site until after midnight. Its a pity I cant see specific times on Google. Perhaps the exported reports from Facebook ad manager will tell me, but I can’t open it properly at the moment since the .xls file messes up when I open it in Open Office.
For the rest of the days, I can’t explain the differences between Facebook ad clicks and Google analytics visits.
In total, I was charged 120 Dollars for the ad campaign. I assumed (incorrectly?) that I would only be paying if the ad was clicked so according to the clicks shown above I should only have to pay 66 Dollars as it was 1 dollar per click.
I told the Ad manager I would like to spend no more than 10 Dollars per day so it seems I was charged the full 10 Dollars per day regardless of the number of Clicks.
Has anyone else advertised on Facebook? If you’re considering it, read Damien Mulleys tutorial on Advertising on Facebook and read Alexia Golez’s post about getting money for free to advertise.
