As Facebook is gaining momentum as an advertising platform now, Nanigans, a Facebook advertising-software company, has conducted a research to figure out, which types of ads work best to drive sales. The researchers have analyzed over 975 million Facebook ad impressions to retailers’ ads in the U.S. in December 2012 and January 2013.

Nanigans discovered that sidebar ads are less effective than page post ads in the newsfeed—they have a 0.04% and 1.87% (46 times higher) clickthrough rate, respectively. Moreover, in multiple page post ad campaigns, this rate went beyond 3.3%. As to ROI, it was also 14% bigger for ads in the newsfeed than for the banner units in the right-hand sidebar.

With this, page post ads cost less—for them, cost-per-click was on average 68% lower (ranged from $0.14—$0.26) and cost-per-action was 48% lower than the same costs for marketplace ads. Nanigans also compared the performance level of Facebook page post ads on mobile and desktop. According to the research, page post ads on mobile achieved 1.9 times higher CTRs than ads of the same format, viewed on desktop, plus page post ads on mobile platform generated 46% of the cost (CPCs) than on desktop.

Image courtesy: Images from Nanigans’ study «How Facebook Page Post Ads in the News Feed Drive Purchase Revenue & ROI,»  www.nanigans.com (click to enlarge)