Google Cache and Facebook Adverts

[swinnie]

Hi Guys,

My uncle has a website for his driving school, and according to Awstats, he seems to get around 400 - 600 unique visitors per month. He runs an advert on Facebook for his site, targeted 16km around the two towns he focuses on.

A lot of the traffic, say 80 - 90% of the traffic each month comes from Facebook. However, he gets very little enquiries from the site through email forms or any phone calls/texts etc. He spends £4 a day on Facebook Ads, which I do not think is good value considering what he has earnt from Facebook Ads.

What are your experiences from Facebook Ads? I myself would never click on one, and neither would any of my friends. I also remember reading an article somewhere and 90% out 500 people surveyed (I think) would not click on a Facebook Advert.

Also, I noticed his site was not cached by Google, yet when I checked the otherday it as. Is there any general explanation to this; or just one of those things?

Many thanks in advance.

 

[Mp4]

does he advertise in any other places other than online ? (local paper etc?)
I know that maybe half of ocuk that use firefox are bound to have ABP (AdBlock Plus) or something like that so maybe people are not that aware of the driving school etc or that facebook might not rotate the ads that fast so people dont see it?

Some web hosts do a free spam to google to get known maybe something to look into?

 

[Pho]

How professional does his site look? I'd be turned away if it looked a bit dodgy.

Have you got something like Google Analytics running on on the site? It's very useful to give you information as to what people are clicking on once they're on your site, bounce rate etc (more so than Awstats unless you have a decent parser for it). It's as simple as sticking a bit of JavaScript at the bottom of each page in the site, Google do the rest.

 

[3dcandy]

I'm very rarely tempted by ads and find that getting good seo is far better. he needs to make sure that he is ranked highly on google for some good keywords, say like driving school "area" obviously replacing area with the area...

Oh and google analytics is a must, and webmaster tools...both are free!

 

[Edward01]

Facebook has a very low click through rate for adds, something like 0.04%. Perhaps maybe look into Google or Bing (Bing has a high CTR than Google I believe) or the local papers website or even radio ads if his got the cash.

 

[swinnie]

Thanks guys for all of your responses.

does he advertise in any other places other than online ? (local paper etc?)
I know that maybe half of ocuk that use firefox are bound to have ABP (AdBlock Plus) or something like that so maybe people are not that aware of the driving school etc or that facebook might not rotate the ads that fast so people dont see it?

Some web hosts do a free spam to google to get known maybe something to look into?

Yes he does advertise via flyers. My Grandad through his retirement has been leafletting a lot. I think he's nearly covered the main areas he covers.

How professional does his site look? I'd be turned away if it looked a bit dodgy.

Have you got something like Google Analytics running on on the site? It's very useful to give you information as to what people are clicking on once they're on your site, bounce rate etc (more so than Awstats unless you have a decent parser for it). It's as simple as sticking a bit of JavaScript at the bottom of each page in the site, Google do the rest.

His site looks professional, it's not gimmicky or filled with '90s GIFs etc. I am unsure if I can post a link, as I have business interest - being a website developer.

I had largely forgotton about Google Analytics for some reason for his site, that got installed yesterday morning so data is slowly starting to come through.

I'm very rarely tempted by ads and find that getting good seo is far better. he needs to make sure that he is ranked highly on google for some good keywords, say like driving school "area" obviously replacing area with the area...

Oh and google analytics is a must, and webmaster tools...both are free!

Well that is my point, 3dcandy. He won't accept that Facebook isn't as good as Google or Bing. None of them are perfect, but when you want to find something online, you'll use a search engine of some kind. Not Facebook.

Google Analytics is in use, as of yesterday morning. Webmaster Tools is also installed.

 

[swinnie]

Also, what would be the reasons for a cache page being viewable previously but not now? I think I checked Wednesday and it was there, yet on Friday, it wasn't.

 

[3dcandy]

maybe your isp has connectivity problems and thus is getting served the uncached copy. I know some relatives of ours who are on Talk Talk frequently get cached and/or uncached versions of websites due to connectivity and bandwidth issues...