Facebook PPC

Hi Folks,

I've tried my hand at affiliate and internet marketing in the past and met with limited success. In my day job I manage the sample acquisition for a large market research company. I've begun to experiment with using social media advertising to bolster our capabilities in some hard to reach markets.

The problem I'm facing is I can't seem to get ads to perform on Facebook. We are offering a real incentive for participation in our survey but either the incentive is insufficient (and I'm now testing with a higher incentive) or people are blind to survey ads due to the large number of CPA offers that exist in this market.

I looked at the CPA offers in the survey market and I see basically two types. Companies like Toluna (who is a recognized brand in market research) recruit email DOI to join their panel. They don't offer any instant reward other than the ability to participate for future rewards. The way these things work, 5-10 surveys down the road the participant earns enough points to redeem for a prize that's worth about 50% of face value.

The second type is the sweepstakes style, where they offer a larger value incentive but only to a few/one participant. The problem with running ads in this format on a short run basis is that legal rules for running sweepstakes vary by locality and the setup/review required makes it difficult to accomplish on a small scale.

What I've been trying is offering a $10 amazon gift card for participation, but I'm going to add the option of a $10 iTunes gift card into the mix. I'm targeting a younger male demographic, so I think the iTunes card is more likely to be perceived as having real value. So far over 16k impressions I have 0 clicks (target market is a small GEO so this is a good amount of impressions) so obviously my ads are ineffective.

Short of testing new ad and image copy, does anyone have any advice they can give on techniques for facebook ads? Have you found particular ways of approaching this market work better than others? Is it simply a problem with people who don't want to take surveys (I can understand this since many survey CPAs are in-fact scams). What does work on facebook? Without spilling the beans on my project completely, I'm targeting Hawaii, does anyone have other methods for hitting a younger audience in this market they would share?

Thanks!