GM dumped their Facebook advertising. Should you dump yours?

Published on May 19, 2012 GM dumped their Facebook advertising. Should you dump yours?

To rain on the parade of Facebook being listed on the US share market with an Initial Public Offering (IPO), GM dropped a bombshell by withdrawing millions of dollars in Facebook advertising prompting advertisers worldwide to ask why this has happened and should they follow suit.

Although GM have dumped millions of dollars of advertising it does not mean that if you are using Facebook for advertising that you should follow suit. That’s because every business needs to clearly evaluate their advertising and determine if an advertising option is working for them and take the action appropriate for them. What works for one business may not for another.

How to evaluate advertising?

Although Ford was quick to put a quick jab on their Twitter post claiming their Facebook advertising was effective so perhaps it was GM’s fault, the reality is that selling cars is probably not an easy thing to do online, or to measure and that brand building is probably one of the more important things that Ford could be doing online – which they may not need targeted Facebook advertising to do.

If the advertising wasn’t working for them, GM did the right thing as all firms need to evaluate the success of any marketing campaign and be prepared to change things if they aren’t working. It’s one thing to continue to pursue a goal and not to give up if you fail the first time, but if heavy marketing and advertising spending is not working for you, then you can save considerable money putting your spending into other forms of advertising and marketing.

In evaluating a marketing campaign, make sure you consider:

• What your original objectives of that advertising or marketing campaign actually were and how you stated before your campaign that you would evaluate it? Evaluate it at the time you said you would using the method you said you would against the goals you set. Your objective might have been page impressions, or click throughs, or sign ups/conversions on your landing page, or sales through your store. Whatever your objectives be clear what your advertising is for. Brand building advertising might not have a lot of click throughs, but that doesn’t matter as you’re trying to build up name recognition in the minds of your customers.
• What was the click through rate? Compare it to previous campaigns you have run yourself, and against what you can find out that others in your industry receive (you’ll need to research that when you are setting up your campaign). There are no hard and fast rules about click through rates and percentages but we’ve seen a lot of campaigns that marketing teams have considered as successful reaching figures of just 1-3% click through. It comes back to your objectives.
• Get feedback from customers, if you have employees working for your online store then ask them what their experiences were in dealing with customers. Did they notice anything different during the campaign?
• Can you spot any “spikes” in your traffic during the campaign in Google Analytics? When the ads stopped running did your traffic fall back to the pre-advertising levels or sit somewhere else? Was that higher or lower?
• Search for reviews about your business? Have the number of reviews and level of positivity of those reviews changed since the campaign?

There are always a number of metrics that you can use to evaluate marketing effectiveness but the most important point to remember is to know your objectives in advance and measure your success against those objectives. Just because advertising didn’t work for GM doesn’t say anything about Facebook’s effectiveness or what will work for you. Facebook advertising might work for you, or it might not. Just know what you’re measuring before you start.