Facebook Offers

Facebook has a new type of advertising mechanism – Offers. You can create an offer for your Facebook Race Page easily by going to https://www.facebook.com/offers/.

The way it works is that you pay advertising $ to Facebook and they will put the offer into the feed of your target (fans of your race page and typically location).

People who click on the offer will get a pop up and an email (like the one on the right) that will give them instructions on claiming the coupon – like the website to register for your race and the coupon code they will use on the checkout page.

To create a Facebook Offer for your race, click on the green “Create Offers” button in the upper right:

Of course, make sure you set up a coupon in RunSignUp. The coupon code set in RunSignUp should match what you put in your offer.

You will pick your Race Page that will show automatically if you are an administrator for your race page. Then you will set the different parameters that you want for your offer as shown on the right.

Some of the key items you want to think about:

• Make your offer for a limited time only.
• Don’t over discount. 10% will typically get some action from people who know about your race. You may need to be more aggressive if you are establishing a race.
• Make it Fun! In our example we did an April Fools Special.
• Experiment. Don’t spend too much money on your first one – maybe $25 can get you enough reach on Facebook to see if it will work.

The targeting is not yet as good as it is for full Facebook Ads, but I’m sure this will change and evolve.  Certainly fans of your page will be seeing this in their feeds, which will be useful to get people to register.

In our example we did for a race I help direct, we set up the offer on March 31 and ran it until the end of the day on April 1. We had a budget of $26, but only spent $15.65. We reached 1,060 people and had 38 claims of the offer.  This translated to about 50 new registrations (some coupons were used to sign up a couple of people at a time). Our coupon was for 10% off of our $27 race.

We coupled this with an email campaign to our previous runners as well as an email list from our local running store. We sent 2,700 emails and had a 42% open rate and 210 clicks. We had 87 uses of the coupon from the email campaign.

Facebook Offers is an interesting new way to promote your race. Facebook alone will not make your race successful, but used in the right way, it can help promote your race in combination with other community reach out methods.