Facebook is horrible for any kind of direct sale, the ads I see are rarely trying to sell anything directly. More people are trying to build page followings, give something free with an up sale, are attempting to sell something that can be seen as making the customer money or selling services with big margins (wedding based services comes to mind).
Bingo. I'm actually a bit surprised more people don't understand why this is the case and anticipate it.
Search is the optimal context for presenting an ad -- you have the chance to make an impression to a person who is looking for information about something right at that moment. If you can get the right ads correlated to the search terms, you're handing the user a URL to information they're already looking for.
In most other situations, ads are noise -- they're a distraction from what the user really came there to pay attention to.
In the case of Facebook, it's the user's friends and interests. Which means your real goal with a FB campaign is to get people liking/following you. Buying comes later.
100% agree. Even for interests, search is better. Google has a decade of my search history and much of my browsing history (via analytics). Even conversion history - what have I bought? FB has much less insight into my interests because there have been far fewer opportunities to learn about me.
I've had pretty good conversion from Facebook traffic, you do need to spend more time optimizing Facebook ads to get high converting traffic though. You'd expect Google to convert better than FB because presumably the google keyword search were transactional as opposed to passive traffic, but not at that ratio.
Were you doing multi-channel tracking ? - it's much more important when you're going after passive traffic sources in general.
My limited experience has been almost exactly the opposite of that. I think my conversion rate from FB has been significantly better because my software is niche and it's been easier for me to target on FB. But my Google Keyword-Fu could use some work, I'm sure.
Still, by far the best conversion comes from direct interaction with my community of potential users.
Out of curiosity, do you think this is because Google users were searching for something like your products, and FB users weren't? Or do you think it was something else?
Yes. No amount of demographic targeting will do you any good if there was no shopping intent. At least for apparel & other goods that don't offer immediate gratification.
Also out of curiousity, did your 200k come from facebook ads or from your facebook community (fanpage)? I would think that in the apparel business future engagement would be relevant, ie seasonal lines, sales, etc.
did you create the ads directly in the facebook interface?
FB traffic is not very good if you don't optimize and tweak your campaigns to find what works best, but 200k uniques and no conversions is insane and I'm sure you could make that work much, much better; and I have data to prove it
disclaimer: I work for one of the first fb ads API tool vendors, but I'm an engineer, not a salesperson :)
SAM ( http://www.brighteroption.com ); we were in the closed API program and have been running for about a year and a half now.
Don't let the marketing talk of the homepage fool you into thinking we are all social-mediay-businesslike, we run on smart code and awesome client servicing.
Google brings us a few hundred a day, consisten conversion.
Apparel retail. FWIW.
As far as I'm concerned FB traffic is junk. Comes handy for load-testing though.