Facebook is the latest internet success story despite having being around since 2004. Last year Microsoft bought a share of the company which valued Facebook at $14 billion. There's millions addicted enough to be on there several times a day, myself included and with many of those sat in their offices it's an ideal demographic for advertising Work Rewired.

I'm not a big fan of search based traffic such as Google. You're competing against people prepared to pay crazy amounts for individual clicks and the traffic when it arrives is generally low quality. Traffic driven organically from Google spends twice as long at Work Rewired than that from Google keyword ads. Traffic from other sources spends six times longer at the site than that brought in by Google keyword ads.

The Facebook model is different to Google's. The ads show up on users pages mixed in with content from their friends. I decided to target those bored at work.

The first sign that this wasn't going to be a great experience came with the way ads are approved. If you add a new advert or make a small change it'll take a day for someone to review that change. Then you get the rejected email which says nothing more than your ad was rejected for punctuation. There's a link to their ads policy but it's massive and of little direct help. I checked the ad and saw no problems.

So I dropped an email to customer services but they wouldn't respond for three days as it turned out so I rechecked the ads. Turns out I'd missed a full stop (period) from the end of one of the ads. Annoying. Why don't they just tell you when they reject it? Surely it's more effective to have the person who reviews the ad say what's up rather than have the customer email in and wait three days for a reply. If they're feeling really adventurous they could add the full stop there and then.

The results from the ads when they finally went live were worse than disappointing. At the time of writing two ads have had a total of 30,000 impressions and a total of one click resulting in nothing meaningful.

Maybe it's the quality of the ads on there. But having seen at least some traffic from the Google ads I'd expect some from the Facebook ads. I think the issue is that people just aren't seeing the ads. When I'm on Facebook I checked out the gossip from my friends, look through their new photos and see what's going on. I don't recall an ad and have never clicked one.

And if what I experienced is the same for other advertisers then it poses an interesting problem for Facebook. They may have 80 million users but how do you gain revenue from that traffic. It doesn't appear to be advertising.

I've had another go. One good feature is you can target people at specific companies such as Boeing employees so I'm running ads doing just that. When they've been approved I'll update on the stats.

What are other people's experiences of advertising on Facebook?