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Pizza Delicious Bought An Ad On Facebook. How'd It Do?

Pizza Delicious
Nick Sherman
/
Flickr
Pizza Delicious

Read More Of Our Facebook Coverage: Is Facebook Worth $100 Billion? and How Facebook Can Live Up To The Hype

Michael Friedman and Greg Augarten sell New York-style pizza in New Orleans. Their operation, Pizza Delicious, is a takeout window between Piety Street and Desire Street. They're only open two nights a week. If you're in the know, you can call them up and order a pie.

Business has been good, and they're about to buy their own place. So for the first time they're considering paid advertising. They'd been thinking about advertising on Facebook but didn't know how to proceed.

Meanwhile, we were working on some stories about Facebook and wanted to get inside the Facebook ad campaign and see if it really worked.

So we hooked the Pizza Delicious guys up with Rob Leathern, a social media ad guru.

The key question they tried to answer: Which Facebook users should they target with their ad campaign?

Their first idea was to target the friends of people who already liked Pizza Delicious on Facebook. But that wound up targeting 74 percent of people in New Orleans on Facebook — 224,000 people. They needed something narrower.

The Pizza Delicious guys really wanted to find people jonesing for real New York pizza. So they tried to target people who had other New York likes — the Jets, the Knicks, Notorious B.I.G. Making the New York connection cut the reach of the ad down to 15,000.

Seemed perfect. But 12 hours later, Michael called us. "It was all zeroes across the board," he said. Facebook doesn't make money till people click on the ad. If nobody clicks, Facebook turns the ad off. They'd struck out.

So they changed the target to New Orleans fans of Italian food: mozzarella, gnocchi, espresso. This time they were targeting 30,000 people.

Those ads went viral. They got twice the usual number of click-throughs, on average. The ad showed up more than 700,000 times. Basically, everyone in New Orleans on Facebook saw it. Twice. Pizza Delicious got close to 20 times the number of Facebook fans it usually gets in two days. The guys were stoked.

The performance of a pizza shop's Facebook ad.
/ Pizza Delicious
/
Pizza Delicious
The performance of a pizza shop's Facebook ad.

The campaign cost them $240 — almost $1 for each new Facebook fan they got from the campaign.

"Is that feeling of exhilaration worth $240?" Michael said. "I don't know — hopefully that translates into new business."

It didn't.

After a long night of asking every single customer where he found out about Pizza Delicious, not one said it was through Facebook.

But while Greg took the garbage out, he checked his phone. And there was a message:

"Just found out about you guys via a sponsored Facebook ad if you can believe it. Super excited about your new place — happy to toss in a few bones over the top."

That guy kicked in $10 to support the new restaurant.

"And that was cool," Michael said. "We got some return on our ad."

That return — $10 on a $240 investment — isn't much.

Maybe at some point, the new Pizza Delicious fans will show up and buy some pizza. But social advertising is so new that nobody knows for sure. It's still unproven, untested and largely unstudied.

Some companies, like Ben and Jerry's, say they have gotten a big return. Others say they haven't. On Tuesday, GM said it was pulling its Facebook ads because the ads haven't done enough to generate new business.

Read More Of Our Facebook Coverage:

  • Is Facebook Worth $100 Billion?
  • How Facebook Can Live Up To The Hype
  • Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

    Steve Henn is NPR's technology correspondent based in Menlo Park, California, who is currently on assignment with Planet Money. An award winning journalist, he now covers the intersection of technology and modern life - exploring how digital innovations are changing the way we interact with people we love, the institutions we depend on and the world around us. In 2012 he came frighteningly close to crashing one of the first Tesla sedans ever made. He has taken a ride in a self-driving car, and flown a drone around Stanford's campus with a legal expert on privacy and robotics.
    Zoe Chace explains the mysteries of the global economy for NPR's Planet Money. As a reporter for the team, Chace knows how to find compelling stories in unlikely places, including a lollipop factory in Ohio struggling to stay open, a pasta plant in Italy where everyone calls in sick, and a recording studio in New York mixing Rihanna's next hit.