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Comment by cm2012 | Hacker News Reader

cm2012

Professional marketer perspective:

Sales and Marketing is around 60% of revenue at 47 million a year. Advertising is around 5 million a year, so the rest of the spend looks like sales costs, content production, and maybe event marketing.

The media spend seems to be mostly adwords: "The effectiveness of our online advertising has varied over time and may vary in the future due to competition for key search terms, changes in search engine use, and changes in the search algorithms used by major search engines."

Also, they only have 5000 FB likes - if they were spending $100k+ a month on FB these likes would be higher as a byproduct of the paid spend. I do a ton of B2B/SMB FB advertising, my guess is that they could move some spend to FB from AdWords and see better ROI.

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Jesus, do people really like company FB pages (especially B2B companies) at all these days?

For every $ spent in fb newsfeed ad spend, you'll get some folks liking your page.

Real, or fake people? Do those likes quantifiably translate in to $$s?

Real, and not really. It's a side effect of generating sales.

If I see something of interest I'll like it just to keep an eye on it. If after a couple+ weeks it doesn't pan out, I unlike.

What's FB?

Facebook

Could they really see a better ROI moving from Adwords to FB for a B2B market? I'm curious, because I run a B2B business and I never would have thought FB ads would work. I always assumed FB was for B2C. I currently use Capterra and Adwords.

50% of all americans, and thus business owners, use FB or IG every day of their lives. I've personally managed at least 10 mil in profitable B2B FB spend.

we tried it and it did not work for us, sure we got some leads/registrations from facebook, but most of them registered for whatever reason, im pretty sure they did not understand what they are signing up, and those that where ok (maybee 10%) did not stay after trial. we even tried traditional media/portals banners with a bigger budget, nothing, and for both of those we hired outside agency to run it. The only thing working for us is adwords/seo and recomendations. it would be great if we could diversify but for our b2b it does not work like that.

i can imagine fb being great for b2c especially for something with emotional connection. but for b2b i'm sure that in most cases it does not work, at leas not in creating leads/registrations.

I can guarantee you it can work for B2B at scale. I've personally grown multiple B2B accounts from $0 to an ROI positive six figures monthly. From seed stage start-ups to post IPO companies.

That's not to say you did anything wrong - it's possible your specific set-up wouldn't work. But many agencies do not know how to do it.

how is that measured ?. initially we thought, how stupid we where in not paying for facebook earlier because of increase in signups. but on closer look the registrations all where from private individuals (remember we are b2b) and they would never fill out the data about the company or even log again after initial signup. even those that where registered as companies never used it.

i think facebook user has a different expectation then google. i know some companies first hand that had great expirience with b2c, i never meet some that did great in b2b.

maybe if our focus was more on creating a community around a common thema, and then do brand building or so, it could work as a secondary generator of leads, but for pure,i pay for an ad and the goal is to get an conversation it was not that great.

so if you could write more about what does work it would be great because only relaying on adwords and always increasing cpc is not that appealing.

Measured by revenue generated per $ spent. What works depends on your specific situation.

I'd recommend both. For example, social media is a good place to do retargeting because people spend so much time on it. Usually after you've warmed up potential customers either on FB channels or outside. Also, Facebook owns a lot of mobile engagement, which is pretty huge.

The Facebook advertising spend is most likely remarketing, not post/page promotion.

Could be. We have used Facebook ads to provide branding cover at events. You set a super tight geofence for the campaign and saturate everyone at the conference. The modern equivalent of putting ads in the conference bathroom.

I'm sure they do remarketing. I'm saying that their pure acquisition spend on FB doesn't look high.

Edit: They have no live ads, so they are not running FB retargeting even:

https://www.facebook.com/pg/PagerDuty/ads/?ref=page_internal

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