Ask HN: Ads with small budget for personal project?
Here's the problem: I only have a small budget I can afford and that is 15€ per day, per platform.
1. With Facebook, they say they sent more than double the clicks Analytics tells me they sent and the clicks that do pass through have an almost 100% bounce rate with average time spent on page of 0 seconds. For example, they say they sent 300 clicks in a week, but I only see 120-130 in Analytics.
2. With the same ad, on Reddit Ads, I see in Analytics 90-95% of the clicks they said they sent and the bounce rate is about 82%, with more than 3 minutes average sessions.
With both platforms I run an ad and then a retargeting ad. Until now, this was the only strategy that had relative success.
All the people that consulted on the ads said that with 15€ per day, Facebook gives 0 results, which I already saw and I find disappointing. The only explanation I can find is that on Facebook I only get bot clicks.
Are there any other platforms that are more suitable for my budget?
68 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadDepending on the nature of the product it might be worth getting somebody to do an (honest) paid review of it. It both gives you an impression of how somebody is interacting with your product and gives you exposure to their audience.
Either this or rethink your packaging entirely. If it's pay to play, consider having a free tier. Make sure you are only charging your proper rates to those fully invested in your product.
Set a specific target URL parameter and check your logs. Depending on your topic, you may see anywhere between 0% and 80% of ad/tracking blockers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ads
They are probably more effective than Facebook because they are much more targeted. It does depend on your audience though, I don't know of anybody reasonably technical who doesn't have an ad-blocker installed so maybe not so useful for targeting those people.
I also found for my targeted keywords I had indirect competitors who could afford to outbid me because they were selling much higher value products. They could afford a much higher cost of acquisition because they were expecting a $10,000+ sale whereas my average was $250. Some of my peers also found competitors stuffed with VC money. They were willing to lose money on each transaction in the hope of making it up later.
Finally Google is a bit scammy when it comes to the whole Adwords control panel. They will introduce new features and select the option which enriches them rather than you. In particular be wary of broad match on keywords. Running a successful campaign requires a reasonable amount of diligence on your part.
The question is who is sending this bot traffic? Fb itself? It's a bit doubtful since all their shenanigans about tracking people and targeting is to improve conversions for their advertisers so they spend more. Also if a software like Darwin can detect and flag bot traffic how come FB can't? What am i missing here?
(1) https://www.indiehackers.com/post/facebook-ads-is-it-all-bot...
From our experience you need to be spending 8-10x that per day to kick start a campaign on Facebook.
Additionally, depending on your projects market Facebook/Instagram results can vary very widely. Targeting is hard, you can obviously use Facebooks audience tools to try and target but from our experience these can be difficult to get right. Without a little more information about your project I can't really suggest anything else. This is where the ML targeting is essential but as I said that need significant traffic to work.
> Facebook ... say they sent 300 clicks in a week, but I only see 120-130 in Analytics
This is about right from our estimation, it's a fairly new occurrence and down to Apples tracking changes that came in with iOS 14.5. If your target market are likely to have a large proportion of iOS users the tracking of Facebook ads has gotten quite bad. We estimate that up to 60% of iOS clicks are not tracked by Facebook/Analytics, Facebook obviosly know someone clicked the ad, but after that the tracking can break very easily. This is particularly bad for conversion tracking.
We have also experienced big problems with tracking people who leave the Facebook in app browser and move to their main browser to continue. We have found popping up a message encouraging them to open in their main browser if they try to navigate away from the landing page works well. It ensures that any Facebook/Analytics url args are still present in the URL when they move browser, setting a new tracking cookie based on them.
When we introduced this before Christmas we saw a massive increase in general trackability with Facebook.
> Are there any other platforms that are more suitable for my budget?
I would consider Google search result ads, it potentially allows you to target people who are already looking for something like what you are doing. It tends to have a significantly higher conversion rate than display advertising. Particularly at your daily budget it would be easer to play with, although at 15€/day you will only be getting 10-20ish (ballpark) clicks per day. If you have a conversion rate of say 2.5% (again about ballpark) then that's about 1 conversion every two-four days.
More generally, it's better to have the option and not use it than not have the option at all.
[0] https://www.slowernews.com/sponsor
- What is the current price. I can see you have an ad so presumably it is >30.
- Do I pay quarterly? I think that is implied but it isn't quite clear.
It's still 30€ (per quarter) once I don't have a real sponsor. The actual affiliate link is mine.
> Do I pay quarterly? I think that is implied but it isn't quite clear.
Yes. It only makes sense to allow quarterly ads. The money involved is tiny and it fits the idea of the site.
Thanks for pointing this things, I already updated some tidbits there.
This is largely Apple's tracking changes. About 60% of the market is iOS.
In today's world with privacy changes and regulations, you're pretty much limited to econometric time series modeling or A/B testing to understand cross platform marketing drivers reliably. That doesn't really work on 15 dollars a day
With that kind of a budget, it's going to be more worthwhile looking at who is your prime prospect, what is the value you're adding to them and the choice of platform and message follows that.
There's no indication of what it is unfortunately in your post.
What I started doing next is laser focused prospecting and reaching out to them directly. That has been more successful, although feels sleazy and from time to time people get pretty mad about the outreach.
So try to figure out who benefits the most from your solution, and how you can find them. Then tailor your sales material for them, find them and reach out to them.
Prospecting will help you make better ads as well if you want to continue with them.
Sounds like a lot of work? It is! Good luck with your project!!
On a side project last summer, I was able to work with a company running education niche groups. To join 10 of their groups (total reach probably around 30k audience) was $500 per month billed on PayPal. Could make a post per day in all 10 groups, so 300 posts. The conversion rate was better than any other paid advertising we had tried and the targeting was much easier.
It’s easy to get started: find a few Facebook groups you might be interested in joining, go to about this group, add the admin as a friend/send a message request, and ask about advertising opportunities. Be sure to show them your project, and why you think it would be beneficial to their audience, that will help your case!
Also - have you thought about going to teachers with your product (assuming it’s compass letters from your post history), getting them on a free subscription, and hoping the kids go home and tell their parents they want to get the letters too?
This is very interesting. Could please you tell me the name of that company and provide their contacts?
My email is in profile in case you don't want to share publicly.
This is the landing page: https://thecompassletters.com/read-travel-letters/
If this product is for entertainment, then I need more proof that I will be entertained. It’s very difficult to convince me to buy this when I have access to the internet, books, and lots of video streaming services for the same purpose.
If this product is educational in nature, then I can see how you might convince parents to buy it for their kids so that their kids can learn about cultures around the world. Also, kids are gonna be more excited about getting physical mail than adults (I suspect). If this were my project, I would probably pivot to selling to parents (maybe especially home-schooling parents). You might be able to sell to schools too (private schools?).
Good luck! Entrepreneurship is so hard.
To combat this, you can set up scroll tracking. There are some GTM templates out there. Every time someone scrolls to a percentage of the whole of a page (for instance, 25% of the page but you can set it for pixels too), you can push data to the server. This artificially reduces bounce rate (yay?) but it gives you a much better idea of if people are actually getting anywhere in your content. It's actionable to know how far people are willing to scroll down your page.
Facebook Ads, like many platforms, have terrible placements by default that get mis-clicks that drive lots of clicks in the Facebook UI. Lots of these people click the back button before they even get to your site so analytics does not fire. A good example is an in-app ad where a user gets a reward for watching your ad. They may accidentally thumb it. Turn off all placements except Feed for FB & IG. These are the most expensive but the most reliable and highest quality for a small budget.
Ads are ruthless in the early stages unless you have a truly unique product/service and can run Google Ads. If I had a unique offering ("world's only data center ____ solution" then I would start there.
If you're a me-too company or just offering services, I would evaluate ads vs other channels like sales.
This is probably the best advice when it comes to this specific topic; however, there are some other options which I still suggest you play in (see below).
>Ads are ruthless in the early stages unless you have a truly unique product/service and can run Google Ads.
There are entire companies that exist solely to dominate search results for branded and non-branded search terms related to businesses that already have product in market. You're NOT going to compete with companies spending multiple millions of dollars a month in Paid Search.
What you can do, however, is work on dominating Organic Search results via SEO. While these same companies are competing with best-practices in SEO, they cannot win with investment alone. You too can follow the same best practices and potentially get the search engines to pay attention to you too. If you can land on the first page of results, you have a real shot.
Oh god how many times I've tried to explain this to people. High bounce rate can even be a sign of a really good landing page in that if you don't interact with the content in any other way that could mean you found all the information you were looking for and didn't have to navigate elsewhere digging for stuff. Of course, if you have a conversion / funnel you'll be measuring that as well, and then bounce rate becomes even more useless of a metric.
If your project is what I think it is (anonymous email), then ads based on user surveillance, like Google and Reddit, probably aren't going to work. Maybe try sponsoring a talk at a security conference or get a billboard on the main commute lines of a tech-heavy neighborhood.
Paid advertising should only work when you already have data on your LTV, payback and cohorts.
You can literally get hundreds of thousands of impressions by looking at your audience, finding similar attributes and then posting to niche: - Reddits - Facebook groups - Telegram communities etc.
Best thing is, its actually free.
I'm not trying to be harsh here, but the reality is that very few people will buy, based on your offer, unless they already know and like you in some way.
In addition, many of the things you're offering are avaiable for free, online, in a digital format, or from bigger companies with large budgets, in magazine formats. It's not clear what sets you apart, or why it would be worth parting with my hard earned money.
You're asking people for their money -- but you're landing page copy needs a lot of work. That is the problem you're running into.
Before having a successful advertising campaign, you will have to spend a lot of time iterating and testing different offers, to see what works and what doesn't. That's the stage you're at right now.
1 - What is the ROI on the Reddit ads? Maybe it's worth spending $30/day on Reddit rather than splitting between that and a platform with -100% ROI. You need to reach a certain threshold of traffic before you can reliable start testing the ad copy, the offer, funnel, etc.
2 - Where are you sending the ad clicks? If you're just sending them to your website, you might as well just be burning the money to keep warm. Make sure you have a single-purpose landing page where the only goal is to get them to sign up, buy, whatever your goal is. No header; no menu; everything on one fast-loading, minimal-to-no-JS page. You're paying for the traffic, you only care if they convert or not. Convert in this sense might be paying for something, or more likely signing up for an email list or "more information."