Testing Market Demand With Facebook Ads
by adam
Facebook ads can be used to gather some pretty useful data for measuring demand for a new product or service. You can target users by using all kinds of demographic and psychographic filters. For instance: you can target only female users who are between the ages of 22 to 25, are single, live in San Francisco are attending UCSF and listen to Jack Johnson (no, i’m not advertising for a date). That’s some pretty powerful control for a self-service ad platform.
There are certain limitations. For example, you can’t target users by current job title, only by ‘interests’ and current company or college major. Also, the value (intention) behind these clicks is suspect since people are not in a ‘buying’ frame of mind when creeping on their friends photos. Of course, it’s hard to test the conversion rates on fictional products (i usually link the ad to an existing page on some other site), but you can get some good data click-through rate data on facebook (my ads are hovering between .01 and .1 percent). This is pretty low, even by facebook standards and the average cpm’s for my ads worked out to around $0.15. Despite these shortcomings, the interface is solid and I have nothing buy good things to say about the platform so far as it can provide excellent demand modelling for a nascent or non-existent product or service.
Interesting post…i’ve been meaning to try out facebook’s platform for a while, maybe this will get me started. Thanks for sharing.
good concept. I will try this for my next product. thanks!
[...] here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.In my previous post on testing market demand with facebook ads, I extolled the virtues of the Facebook self-serve ad platform for testing feature/product concepts [...]