Think Twice Before Clicking Boost Post

Advertising-lite features like Facebook / Instagram’s Boost Post removes a digital advertising knowledge barrier from the platform’s revenue generation pathway.

Does boosting posts expand your reach?  Yes.  Will it get your page more likes? Sure.  But it represents the absolute lowest threshold to advertising.  The tools built into the Boost Post feature are necessarily less robust than the standard advertising platform.  Add into the equation that if you’re boosting posts rather than deploying them via the full ads platform there is probably a knowledge gap in how ads can and should be run.

The reality is that Facebook didn’t create the boost post feature to make advertising easy for those who aren’t comfortable with full-featured ad platforms.  They did it to make giving money to Facebook easy, ad results be damned.

n=1

The data below is just a sample of 1 account but it does illustrate the difference in effectiveness between a series of boosted posts vs ads deployed via the full platform.  The Result we’re comparing is Link Clicks.

  SpendReach Impressions Results Cost/Result
Boosted Post $          199.00 28,330 28,709 172 $        1.16
Ads Platform $          425.15 63,798 112,851 2,907 $         0.15

Yeah, the spend is more than double (2.14x) between the two but the ads platform also provided more than its full share of value.  Reach is 2.25x and Impressions are 17x greater when using the Ads platform.  The metric where Boosted Post lags the most is with Cost per Result which cost 8 times more(!!!) than using the ads platform with near-identical targeting, messaging, and positioning.

Is there anything you’d pay 8 times more for and get a worse overall result?  It’s worth acknowledging again that we’re looking at an n=1 example but the full ad platform will outperform Boost post every day of the week.

If you’re getting solid business results by boosting posts good for you.  But I’d bet you can do better.

Written by Erik Sunset

Written by Erik Sunset

Erik is the owner and operator of Sunset Marketing Works. Click to learn more about the author.

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