A look at what happened to my blog, and what didn't happen, when I promoted a post on Facebook.

1. Bonefish on the Brain
Ad performance for Promoted Post
Click-throughs and traffic
www.bonefishonthebrain.com

2. On Monday, 2/11, I promoted a post from my Facebook page.
That post pointed to a blog post on the blog about handling bonefish:
http://bonefishonthebrain.com/2013/02/11/how-to-handle-bonefish/
You can clearly see the spike on the right hand side the corresponds to the
“reach” of this Facebook post.
You can also see that the huge spike in “reach” does not translate to a
huge jump in “People talking about this,” the green line below the spike.

3. It does appear that some likes may have been generated by the
promoted post, but you’ll see that it is not that out of line with what
I was getting earlier, without promoting a post.

4. You can see the ad performance here. The numbers put forward at different
points of FB don’t align. By this time the whole $10 was spent, but it says here
only $8.64 was spent.

5. The main question I had was simple. Did more people come to the blog as a
result of this ad. The answer, appears to be simple. No. This is the week of the
post and you can see a very, very minor rise on the 12th, but well within the
normal range of variation for the blog.

6. You can see the short term duration of the traffic generated for this
post, which is very similar to viewership for most posts.

7. The week of the promoted post. Referral traffic is 30.03%.

8. The week before the promoted post. Referral Traffic is 28.54%. So, there was a rise
in traffic, but it was only a rise of about 1.5%.

9. The week of the promoted post, 396 referrals from Facebook and Facebook Mobile.

10. The week before the promoted post, 349 referrals from Facebook and Facebook Mobile

11. In the end, it seems pretty clear to me that this…
Didn’t filter through to the blog itself, at least not in any
way that I can track.
I have seen no sign of this reported increase in reach
impacting my blog visits.