We manage a lot of advertising accounts for clients, mainly in Facebook but also on Google Adwords and more recently Twitter. Personally, I find it one of the most rewarding aspects of on-line marketing, in part due to the ease of tracking return-on-investment (ROI) but also because of the wealth of data that we can get from the various platforms that tell us about who saw the ad and what action they performed.

A recent campaign highlighted this really clearly and I wanted to share it with you as a case study on why your advertising metrics are so important.

The company we ran this short campaign for sells t-shirts, but not just any t-shirts. Their range of products is very specific as they depict caricatures of Welsh Rugby players – very simple and very targeted. Instantly, you can get a picture of a typical rugby supporter in your mind that you would imagine to be interested in a product of this nature. You can start to create a profile for a rugby supporter, their age, their range of jobs, their interest, their social profile etc, but when you run an advert on Facebook you can sometimes get a clearer picture of who you should target.

For example, we ran a number of adverts promoting a special offer for this client offering a discount on their t-shirts in the run up to Christmas. We designed each advert to promote the products with the intention of gaining some new Likes on their page (and hopefully sales). For each campaign we decided to split test the adverts and monitor who clicked, liked and shared the ads.

The resulting data was very interesting but the simplest split (and one that surprised us) was the split between male and female. As you can see from the following screenshot, the difference between male and female is quite significant especially in terms of future promotion.

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The number of clicks shown above would suggest that the male viewers are more likely to click the advert having gained the most clicks. When you drill down a bit further, the cost for getting those clicks is almost twice that of female viewers but, more importantly for ROI, the number of Likes gained on the page is much higher for female viewers.

Now, take a look at the line highlighted and note the cost per Like. A huge difference between the cost of 3 male likes compared to 8 female likes. For an advertiser with limited funds to spend this is vital information. Why spend £10 for a male like when you can get more than 5 likes for the same spend if you only advertise to women?

Hold on though. I’m sure you’re thinking that’s all well and good but are men more likely to actually buy from their on-line store? Don’t discount male viewers just because they’re less likely to Like a page.

The truth is that the customers of this website do tend to be women and indeed mothers so buy as gifts so in future this client will be spending most of the advertising budget targeting women rugby fans and next time we will split test on age and look for trends on parenting to see if any similar metrics are produced to help us to target even more closely – ensuring an optimum spend for this clients budget.