We Spent $1,138 on Facebook in 6 Days: Numbers and Lessons Learned (signnow.com)
We just completed our first Facebook advertising campaign, corresponding with our trip to TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference. Startups test theories, so we treated this first attempt as an experiment. Here is what we did and our results.
68 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadThe author seems pleased with the results, but as an outsider who isn't familiar with his company I see an ad campaign that cost over $1,000, achieved clickthroughs well under 0.1% despite targeting, and does not appear to have resulted in any measurable benefit at all. There are some comments at the end of the article about how Facebook is great for brand awareness, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence of that in the numbers.
If I were looking at ways to spend advertising budget for a new company (oh, wait, I am looking for...) then this seems like a pretty compelling argument for not wasting money on Facebook ads.
Hard to quantify the value of that. My opinion is that it's worth a lot for the early ears, but not if you are thinking short term only.
I think the sceptic in me says that if you didn't get a worthwhile hit from a targeted ad spend, and if the Likers are only a subset of that target market, many of whom didn't even leave Facebook to visit your site, then it's unlikely to give a worthwhile conversion rate down the line either. Maybe the sceptic in me is wrong on this one, but only time will tell...
Only a fraction of a page's fans will see each update from that page. By some estimates, that number is only 5-10% of a page's fans. So they've earned 700 new fans, but that doesn't mean 700 impressions each time they post.
$250/day and on no day did facebook generate more than 40 hits. i would not consider that a success.
if facebook ads are good for "brand awareness" would it make more sense to use CPM ads with some sort of logo and/or memorable copy? they seem to be a bit cheaper.
(checking), yup, we had 83 clickthroughs today and a total cost of $4.09.
CTR is at about 1.18%
(quickly scratches FB off of list of advertising vehicles)
Typically with FB, you are doing well if you are finding anything near 0.05% CTR. Remember, these are content ads and not paid search.
Paid search you should be hitting 5%+ CTR on your top search keywords (in position 1-2, around 3% for #3 and 2% or less for anything below). On FB, getting an ad with a consistent 0.077% CTR means they are on to something and should keep going.
Don't knock FB off your list of advertising venues though. Each one is different and has a completely different dynamic, approach to users and value proposition. With paid search you bid on user intent through keywords - what they are looking for right now. On Facebook you are bidding on people and trying to get their attention, a big difference :)
That's a very important distinction I hadn't really considered. Their method for "targeting" is entirely different.
I wonder which is more effective?
Facebook comes in to play when you know the sort of person you want. Their age, interests, location, education, etc. You can bid on them there and appeal to their situation, needs and interests directly. If you are selling XYZ service for race car drivers, you can appeal to people that love racing cars with an article and lead form telling them how XYZ service is highly essential for their profession.
Different approaches but still profitable. We spend about 40% of our monthly budget on search and 60% on Facebook. FB is very good when trying to generate leads that you eventually turn into sales. Paid search is very good when you want someone to take out their wallet and buy right the hell now, but you also will pay far more for that person.
I call it discovery vs. intent. Google allows you to capture people's intent. Facebook allows you to let your target demographic discover new products.
Why not let it run for an extra week or three? I don't think demoing new software you learned about during a conference is going to really happen by the last day of said conference.
Also if you did not make an impression on attendees enough to merit an @todo item somewhere, Facebook ads seem kind of futile.
Google, Facebook, Bing, etc use it directly to make more money on the same number of ad impressions.
Let's suppose there are 2 advertisers -
Andy who bids $1/click has 1% CTR & Bob who bids $0.60/click has 2% CTR.
When each of the ads are shown to users, Andy's will receive 1 click whereas Bob's will have twice as many clicks (every 100 times the ads are shown). The network (Google, FB, Bing, etc) will make $1.2 on Bob and $1 on Andy. That's some 20% profit right there without any special effort on the network's part while showing ads that interest more to the users. You only click something that interests you, right?
As you can see Bob, who bids a lot lower makes 20% more profit to the network for the same amount of ad impressions.
The second reason is relevance. One of the easiest ways to gauge it is CTR. Google, for one, places such a high importance on it that it has baked CTR right into determining how much you really pay to get that visitor in the form on Quality Scores. On Google if you increase your QS your ads start costing less and appear in better positions for the same (or lower) cost.
This is simple economics at play. If you see on the individual ad performance screenshot you can see that the ad that received 0.077% CTR has highest - - reach - social reach - connections - clicks and most important the least cost-per-click. Who wouldn't like to get all the benefits for a lower cost?
All else equal, you actually want to pay LESS per impression, given the same number of clicks per dollar (your CPC). Of course, in any well-designed dynamic system, the prices of the auction should reflect the different probabilities of being clicked.
Prayer should involve A-B testing. Cain and Abel.
God says... cherish repay pryers sailors transcribe nostrils intend actual interrupted easy echoes combine Wyoming
I think by simply joining Facebook groups in this sector and engaging with the group you could've achieved 600 likes in the same timescale and saved yourself the money.
We use Google mostly for adverts, and we're showing about a $1 per user acquisition rate. That's not CTR rate, that's
clicked ad->saw site->signed up.
At almost $2 just to get a "like", I would be very hard pressed to justify that.
"we averaged $1.83 per 'like'"
"what's a 'like'?"
"somebody click the like button next to us in Facebook"
"how much money is that worth to us?"
"well, it identifies interested people in our service who we can advertise to later"
"so we now know about people who might be interested in our service if we decide to spend even more money advertising to them?"
"basically"
It seems like you can't really judge how much you should spend per like because you haven't yet calculated the revenue and profits per like.
You also can't stop ads after only a thousand or so impressions. Let them run for 50k+ before cutting, as an ad that performs well will take a decent amount of clicks for the bid to fully come down.
http://ads.ak.facebook.com/ads/FacebookAds/FB_Ads_A_B_Testin...
As someone who has run FB ads since the beginning though, I would disagree with one thing: in my experience over the years, people are ok with leaving Facebook, so long as you have a very nice, clean, easy to understand page with a clear value proposition.
My suggestion going forward is this: 1. Take each winning ad and make 3 more variants. 2. Take each interest you were targeting, make a separate campaign for each. 3. Place all variants of your winning ads in each campaign.
The purpose of this is to find which actual interest is responding to your product. Once you find that out, refine it again by breaking up location, age, gender, education, etc.
Get really granular over time. The end result is very good ROI and a solid way of making money on FB :)
Here are my stats on the last week for one campaign where I make about $35-$50 on average per lead:
- Spend: $3,345.30 - Impressions: 6,305,765 - Clicks: 2,570 - CTR: 0.0408% (average, some ads are near 0.1% and they make the most money) - Average CPC: $1.30 - Leads: 237 - Average CPL: $14.11 - Revenue: $8,703.70
That's a pretty damn good ROI. Not every campaign does as well as this, but taking the time to find your audience, craft your message and optimize will yield good results.
Do you have a blog/website that I can follow?
I suspect the higher click-through rate was more about curiosity about the image.
And the next time I see the ad, I do it again.
It may be effective at getting click throughs, but the retention rate likely leaves something to be desired.
Facebook ads is used widely by affiliate marketers, you could spend some time on blogs like MrGreen ( http://stackthatmoney.com ), or affiliate marketing news aggregator ( http://affbuzz.com )
I would change the following if my objective is to get more likes & users.
- Target person, i.e vc, developers, etc instead.
- Limit and test the age groups.
- Target Tech events.
Bids will be cheaper & CTR will be more targeted. If it is not CTR, KILL it. Personally I like what you are doing at signnow, much easier to use than those I used when opening up my trading account.
Maybe you want;
- Add the Facebook icon or something to link to your Facebook page in your website.
- I am kinda of surprised that there's no YouTube explaining signnow, considering doing a hipmunk-like video explaining what signnow does.
- If you have existing customers, do a video case study what it does your customers and how signnow could come in handy in other industries or applications, etc.
Ack...stackthatmoney just screams affiliate coaching scam. Affbuzz still has the A4D meetup in SD advertised on their site which was back in march and only has links to a few of the decent blogs. Seen way to much of that sort of stuff in my years as a full-time affiliate.
In any case, the analysis was interesting enough to make the front page of HN, which I'm betting will bring them a lot more than 139 visits. So well done with that.
Step 1: Install Wordpress. Good, already done.
Step 2: Create a big ol' list of keywords which you think are relevant to your business. For example, [sign contract online], [sign document online], [sign contract with iPhone], [sign contract with Blackberry], etc etc. This doesn't cost anything more than your time.
Step 3: Design a template which, given a particular keyword, includes a few hundred words of content about the keyword and also acts as a landing page for your service. I'm assuming this is effectively free for most of us on HN. The last time I did it it required copy/pasting one file in Wordpress and then five minutes of hacking the PHP to do what I wanted it to do.
Step 4: Write between 50 and 100 of these, depending on how you get them done. This is what costs the $1,000, since you're probably going to zone out after doing this five times, write up the process, and then hire the rest out to freelancers.
Predicted results: on average, depending on query volumes, you're going to pick up a handful of hits for each page every month for life. So instead of having 1,400 clicks once, you'll get somewhere on the order of 400 clicks a month for forever. And instead of them being someone who was just gawking at a pretty girl in Chemistry class or poking their sheep while farming virtual cabbage, it will be someone who is right now trying to solve a problem which is costing their business money.
And if you have $2,000 to spend? It scales right on up.
And if you're savvy about how you do this? Suffice it to say that the MVP of this project gets you a wee little asset to build a business on, and implementing this strategy in a really effective way can basically carry a business on it's back. This is not limited to bingo card publishing empires, trust me.
I think you hit a very important aspect of this: each marketing channel (paid search, Facebook, Mobile, SEO, banners, etc.) is a tool in a toolbox. Go for what works and earns you revenue.
Paid ads yield dividends very quickly and are easily quantifiable. You can figure out what is working, weed out the bad stuff and then capitalize on opportunities. That said, SEO is also really important. While I am less inclined to go with the sparticle approach that many do, I would certainly say that writing up good information about your product in a way that relates to customers is extremely important.
The other part about your SEO content is that it is relevant to your paid ad campaigns. If you have a product that would work well for software developers and will save them money, then by all means write a good article about how awesome it is for them. Make the page a good starting lander for paid ads as well then get it to rank on SEO and drive other paid traffic to it.
In the end, each tool in your toolbox is there to make you money. Find what generates the highest ROI in the period of time you need to make it in. Focus on that and then circle back to each one down the list in turn.
Don't ever leave money on the table - your competitors won't make that mistake.
The last thing I'd want to do is create a bunch of content that would make me look bad in the process. If I'm putting it online behind my company's name, it should be (hopefully) better writing than I could have done myself.
I mean, you could walk straight into the English Department at any university and offer them jobs for students. I guarantee you will get takers. Potential problem: the takers will be English students.
This is also less work because you can create these optimized topical landing pages programmatically and just add some unique keyword rich content to them.
Also if you are adding domains regularly just for content you will have to wait a decent amount of time to let the domain age and you are always starting over at PR0.
So I would have spent the $1000 on formulating a good story and reaching bloggers and journalists (which is what they did, or aimed at, in a way)
(btw what you are advocating here is an excellent idea, I just think it might not work in this case especially as they were looking to run a campaign in parallel with a conference and piggy-back on the conference name)
Edit: I did a quick check on traffic estimator, and not only is keyword search volume low, but it is very competitive. $5 per click in adwords, and the competition looks tough in the main search results:
https://img.skitch.com/20110624-ewwhimkp5bscncyph7tuwhx1te.j...
Edit 2: a good idea would have been to buy keyword searches against 'techcrunch' and 'techcrunch disrupt'
FWIW - In comparing these three methods (Content, AdWords, Facebook) based on their impact on the bottom line ($$$ -> that's what counts, right?) Facebook by far was the worst performer.
The only drawback to this is that it takes patience - results are not immediate.
A few tips:
1) Buy ads on a CPM basis, if you're getting a good conversion rate then CPM is a lot cheaper than CPC on Facebook.
2) Don't target a bunch of keywords together, chances are some of those keywords have great CTR and some of them have terrible CTR, running one ad targeting them all means you can't filter out the poorly performing keywords.
3) Geographic focus, concentrating on the major tech areas rather than the whole US would probably give them a much more targeted audience.
4) Their budget was too high to begin with, you can experiment on a much smaller budget to get statistically meaningful results. Once you've figured out what works then you can start throwing money at it.
[1] http://euri.ca/2011/04/facebook-advertising-prices-part-2/
If you run CPC ads Facebook will show your ads more often to users who are "click happy" (they've said so publicly), there's also an impression among a lot of advertisers that Facebook charge a premium for CPC (which they haven't been willing to confirm or deny)
Also if you're buying CPM Facebook give you a "quality" discount, so if you have a good CTR you actually end up paying a much lower price than the initial suggested bid.