I finally took the time to set up a website, Facebook page and Twitter account for Judge Chiropractic, my father’s business. As you can see from the site, it’s pretty bare bones but does a nice job of covering the basics for a local business (services offered, hours of operation, address, contact information, and an about section for the business). If you search for “Judge Chiropractic” you’ll see that the site already shows up in the first page of the Google search results, ranking #8. I was pretty excited to see this as it has only been up for a week (perhaps that points to value of a domain that directly matches your search term). Equally interesting to see the Facebook page sitting two spots higher (#6) in the search results.

Given how powerful a tool a Facebook page can be for a local business, I thought it’d be fun to test an ad designed to generate page likes (or fans). If you’ve never built an ad in Facebook before, they make it incredibly easy and give you a set of rich targeting tools to work with. Here’s a look at the ad I created:

Facebook ad for Judge Chiropractic and targeting options

I thought this targeting made sense - show the ad to folks who haven’t already liked the page, live within 25 miles of Albia, IA (my father cares for patients from other nearby towns), and are 18 years or older. I set the daily budget to $5 per day (the Facebook minimum), and here are the results of after running the ad for five days:

Cost per Like (CPL) for Judge Chiropractic

The ad generated 81 new fans for a total cost of $28.84, or $0.36 Cost per Page Like (CPL). This cost felt like a no brainer to me given the ability to target people I assume were already familiar with my father but not yet following his page on Facebook. He can now communicate with these folks at no additional cost, in a place where they’re already use to spending a lot of their day.

Next, I plan to run some tests with Twitter and Google, and also tweak the site so it looks great and is responsive. I haven’t told my dad about the Facebook ad yet (or really any of this), but I’m sure he’ll be happy with the results of building his online presence and running experiments like this over time. We just have to get over that “What is Facebook?” conversation :)