What sitting in a hallway, real estate, and Facebook ads have in common

The past few days, FranchiseHelp had the pleasure of attending the 6th Annual International Franchise Brokers Conference and Expo. As part of our attendance, we were invited to exhibit in the hallway right outside of the exhibition hall. (Franchises that work directly with the brokers were invited to sit in the hall itself.)

As the conference wore on, I noticed that we were receiving quite a bit more visitors to our booth than we usually do at conferences like that. It took me a second to realize it, but I ended up that we were the beneficiaries of rule

1 of real estate: location, location, location.

Rather depending on people to come to us, we came to them! What a concept!

And of course being the franchise marketer that I am, I started to draw a number of similarities to the world of internet advertising.

In terms of Facebook advertising, there are two primary spots that you can be featured, the news feed and the right rail:

For those who use Facebook regularly, you’ll know that the news feed is full of updates relevant to your life while the right rail is simply advertisements.

So, as a Facebook user, you’re forced to interact with the news feed while the decision as whether or not to interact with the right rail is yours.

So why does that matter? Well, it turns out you see a very different engagement pattern with the news feed relative to the right rail.

Here’s the report of click through rate for the 57 different Facebook campaigns we ran between September and November 2014:

The orange bars represent the news feed ads and have an average of a 1.2% click through rate while the right rail ads in grey only have an average of 0.2% click-through rate!

So it turns out that on Facebook, location is everything!

If you place your ads where users have to seek them out, you can expect that traffic will be limited where if you place them where users are anyway, traffic will be much higher.

It works at franchise conferences, real estate, and Facebook. Location, location, location!

Wanna talk about usingFacebook ads tofind franchisees? Let us know here.