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We Spent $1,138 on Facebook in 6 Days: Numbers and Lessons Learned

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Re: We Spent $1,138 on Facebook in 6 Days: Numbers and Lessons Learned

#51

Post by patio11 »

e1ven wrote: post #47
patio11 wrote: post #41

I don't exactly want to hijack the thread, but let me present an idea of how one could burn $1,000 if one wanted to do it for promotion. 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 co…

I know you've answered this before, but where is your go-to place for quality writing? So many of the places that I've looked at seem Very low content. 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.

You don't have to be Nicholas Kristoff to write about signing contracts online, assuming you have a product which signs contacts online. Everyone on HN knows someone whose job description is Write Stuff About Business. Many of them, particularly young'uns, are underemployed in this economy. Find them, fix their problem.

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.

Re: We Spent $1,138 on Facebook in 6 Days: Numbers and Lessons Learned

#52

Post by amitagrawal »

orijing wrote: post #40
Silhouette wrote: post #2

Am I missing something here? The 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 see…

I don't understand why CTR should matter (except as feedback for whether their ads are performing or not) if they're paying per click (CPC)?

CTR matters for a couple of important reasons - profits & relevance.

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?

Re: We Spent $1,138 on Facebook in 6 Days: Numbers and Lessons Learned

#53

Post by amitagrawal »

kposehn wrote: post #27
kposehn wrote: post #23

Great experiment! Glad to see you got some engagement. 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…

Replying to myself here to give some info on my experiences with 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 e…

I agree. Those numbers are pretty good even for an AdWords advertiser. And the fact that you've been able to scale it really well is even more praise-worthy.

Do you have a blog/website that I can follow?

Re: We Spent $1,138 on Facebook in 6 Days: Numbers and Lessons Learned

#54

Post by ig1 »

It stories like this that make me think I should just build an app that does automated Facebook ad optimization, these guys could have done a lot better than they did. I've run ads targeting US tech audience at 0.5cents a click.

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.

Re: We Spent $1,138 on Facebook in 6 Days: Numbers and Lessons Learned

#55

Post by klbarry »

patio11 wrote: post #41

I don't exactly want to hijack the thread, but let me present an idea of how one could burn $1,000 if one wanted to do it for promotion. 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 co…

Just a quick question, patio - do you make a separate domain for each keyword site, or just put them as pages in a larger domain?

Re: We Spent $1,138 on Facebook in 6 Days: Numbers and Lessons Learned

#56

Post by nikcub »

patio11 wrote: post #41

I don't exactly want to hijack the thread, but let me present an idea of how one could burn $1,000 if one wanted to do it for promotion. 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 co…

I have a feeling that this is the type of product that potential users don't think they need or don't know exists, which would invert the marketing method from finding users with intent to finding everybody and then converting them with your story

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'

Re: We Spent $1,138 on Facebook in 6 Days: Numbers and Lessons Learned

#57

Post by petercooper »

idoh wrote: post #18
mcdowall wrote: post #16

So essentially $1100 for ~600 likes, I certainly wouldn't be happy with that return. It's an informative piece but I think your summary is a bit off regarding the campaign a success generally. 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.

That's about the market rate for buying likes on Facebook (the company I work for used to offer this as a service).

Targeted likes or just likes in general? There are folks on Fiverr who can deliver untargeted likes at 10 cents a pop (which might be useful for the initial social proof). No idea how they do it but I tried as an experiment and they don't all look like zombies.

Re: We Spent $1,138 on Facebook in 6 Days: Numbers and Lessons Learned

#58

Post by mckoss »

kposehn wrote: post #24
bane wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crap, that's terrible performance. We're probably spending $5.00 a day on Google adverts and pulling in about that many clickthroughs. (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)

FB and Google CTR is like comparing apples and unicorns :) 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…

It isn't clear to me that the users clicking the most popular version of their ad were not more interested in beer than in their product.

Re: We Spent $1,138 on Facebook in 6 Days: Numbers and Lessons Learned

#59

Post by ultrasaurus »

ig1 wrote: post #54

It stories like this that make me think I should just build an app that does automated Facebook ad optimization, these guys could have done a lot better than they did. I've run ads targeting US tech audience at 0.5cents a click. 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…

According to my stats [1], the implied click through rate is .04%, so you're very right this ad group would've saved money on average [.057%] (And almost half if they had stuck with the .077% converting ad).

[1] http://euri.ca/2011/04/facebook-advertising-prices-part-2/

Re: We Spent $1,138 on Facebook in 6 Days: Numbers and Lessons Learned

#60

Post by mchusma »

patio11 wrote: post #41

I don't exactly want to hijack the thread, but let me present an idea of how one could burn $1,000 if one wanted to do it for promotion. 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 co…

This is the author Chris, Great idea. We have actually been trying to do a similar thing with our "Ready to Sign" documents, but I like the idea. Thanks for the feedback!
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