Facebook Social Ads

[David Marshall]

Has anyone's institution implemented facebook social ads.. for admissions marketing purposes? Any measurable results?

[Andrew Grohowski]

I come from a PPC marketing background. We've been running an ad and I believe we're stuck in a bidding war, so our data is probably inaccurate. But, we aren't seeing good data. If anyone is thinking of advertising there, they need to think outside of the box with their ad (I didn't have input on creative and design, just bid management).

[David Marshall]

Thanks, Andrew. That's a good point.. my experience is the click rates are low on facebook.. creative thinking is a must. I should note that an ad does not have to be clicked for it to be effective. It can still convey a message.

[Brad Morse]

Yes - I track the stats via google analytics. I setup a funnel/goal - so if the user clicks the ad, goes to landing page, then fills the online registration form - then they completed the goal - from there, we can see how many people enrolled and paid their tuition, so if 300 people applied from that facebook ad, and 100 of them actually enrolled and paid, then you had a 33% success rate.

And (100 x tuition cost) - (cost of ad + cost of man hours) = profit

[Lane Joplin]

We ran 3 ads for roughly two months, and we received 43 inquiries. These are people who clicked through and then took the time to fill out the request of info form. We had 3574 click throughs. So we had ~1% conversion to inquiry, however, we have yet to see any of these convert to applications, and don't expect to see apps for a little while since we have a 3-4 year funnel. So for us right now it's not in our best intrest to continue running ads.

[Stephanie M. Cockerl]

We didn't have stellar results with Facebook. Only a handful of leads.