“Never Bid on the word “facebook” “.  Okay that may have been a too rash of a statement.  Facebook is a great place to meet and reconnect with friends and long lost family. They have a global reach of over 300 million people and growing.  They are one of the most visited websites on the internet right now. That being said, its also a great place to advertise your products and services.  As many may know, Facebook has its own self-serve advertising platform.  It’s extremely targeted as it keys off the demographic information that people willingly share on their in their profiles they created when they initially signed up.  This demographic information can be used to laser target your prospects and eerily stalk them with advertisements that are custom made for them.  Facebook even allows you to target the “conversation” of people on your wall and in your private messages….remind you of anyone…errhem Google (Gmail???).  Needless to say, Facebook is a gold mine waiting to be pillaged by any would be marketer.

So why did I title this post, “Never Bid On Facebook“.   This is because I ignored everything I just mentioned in the above paragraph and decided to bid on the keyword “facebook” in an Microsoft Adcenter PPC campaign.  I had an offer that was basically a Best Buy zip submit offer that I wanted to test against the same people that visit facebook.   I created a page that would mimic the color scheme of Facebook.  Hired a spokesmodel and dressed her in Facebook colors. (Although note to self, white pantyhose do not look well on African American legs.) Then I setup a PPC campaign with only 1 keyword in the adgroup (“facebook”).

I then setup a budget of $100.00 per day and $500.00 per month.  Bid for 1st position in Adcenter , ignored that the cost per click for 1st position was over 1.00 (figured it was a glitch in the system or something) and let her rip.   I watched my prosper202.com tracking page and noticed the traffic was flowing in at a crazy pace.  In the 1st 30 minutes i’d received over 500 clicks to my landing page.  I figured…I’m in the money now!!

Then I waited for my Adcenter stats to update..(I hate that it takes 3 hours to update).  Low and behold I was shocked!!!!   I’d spent a total of 647.11!! In the course of 30 freakin minutes!!

“Wait a minute!!….I set a $100.00 per day daily budget and a $500.00 per month budget!!”  I could not understand why I was being charged so much.  SO I contacted Microsoft Adcenter for an explanation.  After talking with 3 different reps (1 hour each a piece!), I learned that on very high volume keywords, they can not guarantee they would not go over your daily budget. “What the heck?”  A multi-million dollar company can’t ensure they don’t go over budget!?!?  I was upset!.   On top of that, the campaign flopped and I didn’t earn no more than about 30 bucks or so.  After some positioning and complaining on my part, they refunded me $500 bucks to my account.   They explained that I should not bid on a high volume keyword like this again if I was not sure it would convert for me.

Once caveat is that if you setup your campaign and set ONLY a monthly budget and set it up till “spend until depleted“, then you won’t run into this problem.   So basically you are by passing the daily spend and setting a “monthly maximum spend”.  Their system is designed to stop spending once it hits that spend limit….but only if you use this combination.    The draw back from doing this is that you don’t have control over how much gets spent each day.

Lesson learned….