Facebook Advertising: Our Results Thus Far

So it has been a few weeks since we decided to test our luck with a little paid advertising on Facebook. We figured we would spend conservatively, track all activity, and just see what happens.

Going into the process, we understood that as a restaurant, it's extremely tough to track every single call-to-action. This means that there is no way for us to tell if an ad sparked an interest in the person that clicked on the ad if they don't decide to call to make a reservation or fill out our contact form. Most people will just see the ad, view our website, and set a mental note to come dine with us at some point in the near future.

Since we don't burden our diners with surveys and questions that ask them how they heard about us, it's evident that tracking conversions is a little broken in this process. However, with site analytics and the copy within the ad, we can get our message across and vaguely understand how successful our efforts are.

So, two weeks into it, here's where we stand:

Spend: $47.00
Site Visitors: 110
Tracked Actions: 5
Estimated Diners: 12

Overall, it seems that these numbers show us that our efforts have been a success thus far.

This was our strategy with each ad:

- We ran 3 ads total.
- One was targeted to people in Orlando on their birthday telling them to celebrate with us.
- One was targeted to people in Orlando that listed "sushi" as an interest on their profile.
- One was targeted to everybody in Orlando in general.

After analyzing it, surprisingly, over 50% of our conversions were people celebrating their birthday. I guess that means that our restaurant makes for a fun birthday atmosphere (Sake Bombs, anyone?).

In conclusion, we feel that we will continue to advertise on Facebook as long as we continue to see similar results as these. At the very least, targeting on birthdays should always be employed as it has yielded us the most obvious results.