Pizza Delicious Bought An Ad On Facebook. How’d They Do?

 Internet News, Marketing, Your Brand
May 162012
 

So we hooked the Pizza Delicious guys up with Rob Leathern a social media ad guru.

The key question they tried to answer: Which Facebook users should they target with their ad campaign?

Their first idea was to target the friends of people who already liked Pizza Delicious on Facebook. But that wound up targeting 74 percent of people in New Orleans on Facebook — 224,000 people. They needed something narrower.

The Pizza Delicious guys really wanted to find people jonesing for real new york pizza. So they tried to target people who had other New York likes — the Jets, the Knicks, Nororious B.I.G. Making the New York connection cut the reach of the ad down to 15,000.

Seemed perfect. But 12 hours later, Michael called us. “It was all zeroes across the board,” he said. Facebook doesnt make money til people click on the ad. If nobody clicks, Facebook turns the ad off. Theyd struck out.

So they changed the target to New Orleans fans of Italian food: mozzarella, gnocchi, espresso. This time they were targeting 30,000 people.

Those ads went viral. They got twice the usual number of click throughs, on average. The ad showed up more than 700,000 times. Basically, everyone in New Orleans on Facebook saw it. Twice. Pizza Delicious got close to twenty times the number of Facebook fans they usually get in two days. The guys were stoked.

The campaign cost them $240 — almost $1 for each new Facebook fan they got from the campaign. “Is that feeling of exhilaration worth 240 dollars?” Michael said. “I dont know— hopefully, that translates into new business.”

It didnt.

SOURCE: Pizza Delicious Bought An Ad On Facebook. Howd They Do? : Planet Money : NPR.