Within a very short time, Facebook has come a long way as an avenue for online marketing. Facebook is a global phenomenon and is still growing with no end in sight. Its popularity is not just limited to the US.
A recent campaign carried out on paid search as well as Facebook for Intel in seven countries, including the US, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Mexico, Argentina and Indonesia revealed some surprising information. Facebook delivered almost 100 times the impressions when compared to paid search on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
The click through rates were similar for both Facebook and search engines for the same cost. What is most interesting is that on increasing the Facebook advertising budget 10 times, no degradation in statistics was observed. In other words, a ten times higher Facebook advertising budget gave ten times better results as well. This is unlike what is observed in most search engines, where the law of diminishing returns takes over for high internet marketing budgets.
Facebook has come a long way from last year, when Facebook advertisers saw low impressions, low click through rates and practically non-existent conversion rates. Today, Facebook is an effective online advertising platform with a very large ad inventory.
In 2011, Facebook advertising budgets for marketers around the world are likely to increase significantly. According to estimates, advertisers are likely to spend between 10 to 20 percent of the PPC budget on Facebook advertising. As one of the most important social media platforms, for the first time, Facebook will be giving some real competition to search engines as far as PPC is concerned.