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How we unnecessarily burned 20k with Facebook Ads

stackfield.com

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Re: How we unnecessarily burned 20k with Facebook Ads

#41

Post by jcsvyu789jh »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #25

In my experience, facebook is for marketing ( getting your name out). Google is for results ( We had a facebook page with Pokémon Go, where we had 6 events in theme parks. We did it all with facebook and a website... None the less, i seriously changed my opinion about Facebook considering ads. It's not worth it ) We had a reach of 320.000 people with only 100$ spend on ads ( because of the hype it was really cheap an…

I recommend you don't use the conversions/reach number as your primary KPI. From my understanding, you spent $100 on ads, and got 300 conversions.

If a conversion isn't worth $0.33 to you, I would recommend re-examining your pricing structure and perhaps even model.

I may have misunderstood what you said, in which case I apologize. My point is not to criticize your effort, or deny your experience, but to correct a perspective I see a lot.

Don't worry about the number of impressions. Focus on how many customers you can get, then back out the numbers to find out how much revenue that made you.

Re: How we unnecessarily burned 20k with Facebook Ads

#42

Post by bduerst »

gist wrote: post #13
dangrossman wrote: post #10

> Even these users churned after a short time. Why is that? We do not really know! You need to know this, and knowing it is as easy as asking. I e-mail every single person that cancels their subscription, and ask why they cancelled today and what we could have done to better serve them. I don't measure the response rate, but I write every mail personally and read every response, so I can tell you it's well over 50%.…

I am curious how you have used the information to change your product to reduce the churn? What are the results? How would you scale this if you had a larger customer based? (Separately I am always amazed at how larger companies do a lame attempt at the same thing by expecting me to fill out a long survey with simplistic categories after a luxury purchase where they could clearly afford to give the person touch and s…

I can't speak for them, but I've worked with exit survey data that has either confirmed what we knew about some market segments we weren't going after, or highlighted some unforeseen pain points in the product that we later scheduled to fix.

And you're right - the longer the customer survey, the less genuine the company is in actually hearing what you have to say.

Re: How we unnecessarily burned 20k with Facebook Ads

#43

Post by wastedhours »

ssharp wrote: post #15

I wanted to call this out: We solved the first problem through a separate tool, which labels the user with the originating source when registering. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. If you're spending any significant amount of money on advertising, you need to be doing this. Don't rely solely on third-party cookies and session unification attempts. If you have a USER table in your database/crm, add the five UTM fields to it! C…

Totally agree. I literally just spent 9 months getting this integrated at work - now everyone sees it as magic. For people with tech and marketing in their arsenal it should be one of the first steps if you're working with standard tracking link variables. Obviously (with our set up) we're dealing with last touch attribution, but it's still infinitely more worthwhile than not having it.

Re: How we unnecessarily burned 20k with Facebook Ads

#44

Post by jcsvyu789jh »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #4

>Surprisingly, Google Analytics reported only 28.818 visits by users who were redirected from Facebook during this timeframe – i.e. 8,81 percent less. From these users, 3.786 registered on Stackfield. // Hypothesis: Could that be pre-emptive caching - some browsers IIRC will fetch a page ready for display. GA could be showing displayed pages whilst FB are showing followed links? On the general situation, what's the r…

8.8% fewer clicks in GA than what you paid on FB isn't bad, IME.

I'm running a campaign where FB charged me for > 800 clicks. My GA system recorded about 300 clicks.

Slightly under half is about expected whenever i look at numbers. I'm doing remarketing to people who visited my site in the past 7 days, so I'm not sure if that has something to do with it.

Re: How we unnecessarily burned 20k with Facebook Ads

#45

Post by ikeboy »

How do you spend 20k on marketing without testing conversions with a smaller budget first? They could have spent 300, noticed it didn't bring in anywhere close to 300 in sales, and aborted.

How I picked 300:

They're charging 20-80/mo for the product. Assuming they're willing to pay 100 to acquire a user that hangs around for a while, by the time they spent 300 they'd know if they picked up at least 3 users or so. Less than 300 isn't enough to be significant, more than that is wasteful.

Re: How we unnecessarily burned 20k with Facebook Ads

#46

Post by cookiecaper »

threesixandnine wrote: post #33
cookiecaper wrote: post #22

I put a lot of money into advertising through the "proper channels" for my business, including Facebook Ads. We were crushed by a competitor who activated a few links within his PBN and spent some serious time astroturfing, both tactics that I had refused to engage in. The sad reality of online marketing is that people who are buying ads are suckers. The only way to be competitive online is to actively game the mecha…

What is supposed to be astroturfing in this case? Infomercials in media?

I'm not sure I understand your question. Astroturfing is getting online and posting positive stuff about the product while posing as many unaffiliated persons on forums, review sites, social media, etc. This creates an appearance of high popularity and user satisfaction, and like astroturf, you can't tell it's "fake" from a glance. This creates a buzz that causes real users to pay attention and join in.

Since this company was targeting Facebook, if they wanted to astroturf, they'd do it by taking control of many Facebook accounts and posting positive stuff about their product in niche groups, on the product page, etc.

Re: How we unnecessarily burned 20k with Facebook Ads

#47

Post by StreamBright »

ThomPete wrote: post #40

Facebook ads are primarily great for three things; selling games, physical consumer products and local services So if you are selling mobile games, t-shirts or offering plumber services or are a dentist it's great. For most other things it's not really useful.

We tried to use it for local services and we failed. All of the likes were coming from people who did not have anything to do with our service. It was really bizarre. I made the target audience very narrow but could not get a single hit that was a real potential customer. We switched up strategy and just asked everybody in our social network to like our page and share our service. This helped quite a bit, even though this is for free. :) Next thing we did was using meetup.com and target the right meetups with a discount campaign that worked out pretty well, this was also for free.

Re: How we unnecessarily burned 20k with Facebook Ads

#48

Post by bduerst »

jasode wrote: post #14

>, Facebook may just be the wrong audience for a B2B tool. Well, at least you can say that the 20k € was spent to learn that signups from Facebook have a near-zero retention rate. (That's not meant to be a flippant comment.) A lot of successful websites seem to know (or learned) which market channels bring in the right customers. For Stackoverflow.com: most traffic comes via referrals from google.com searches -- but…

Their problem is they are B2B, not B2C, for which social channels tend to be better at. Regardless of traffic, they should always think about running search ads for their branded keywords at least.

Also their differentiation from the rest of the market is E2E encryption, for which there is a small target demographic within project management. Like you said, rather than rely on advertising channels they need to offer functionality to stand out from the crowd, which should be useful but not give away their core revenue services.

They're already starting to do the right thing - Blog posts demonstrating they are subject matter experts, that can get exposure on places like HN (which tends to have demographics who care about E2E encryption).

Re: How we unnecessarily burned 20k with Facebook Ads

#49

Post by ThomPete »

StreamBright wrote: post #47
ThomPete wrote: post #40

Facebook ads are primarily great for three things; selling games, physical consumer products and local services So if you are selling mobile games, t-shirts or offering plumber services or are a dentist it's great. For most other things it's not really useful.

We tried to use it for local services and we failed. All of the likes were coming from people who did not have anything to do with our service. It was really bizarre. I made the target audience very narrow but could not get a single hit that was a real potential customer. We switched up strategy and just asked everybody in our social network to like our page and share our service. This helped quite a bit, even though…

I have had success for those I have helped. My dad picked up quite a few jobs (he is a plumber by education) that way and we only spent around 100USD.

But I am sure there are things where it doesn't work or areas were it wont work.

With regards to asking network yes, thats the first thing I always ask them to do.

In fact I don't understand why larger corporations do not have some social media incentive program for their employers so they can help spread the word and perhaps get leads.

Re: How we unnecessarily burned 20k with Facebook Ads

#50

Post by BillinghamJ »

ikeboy wrote: post #45

How do you spend 20k on marketing without testing conversions with a smaller budget first? They could have spent 300, noticed it didn't bring in anywhere close to 300 in sales, and aborted. How I picked 300: They're charging 20-80/mo for the product. Assuming they're willing to pay 100 to acquire a user that hangs around for a while, by the time they spent 300 they'd know if they picked up at least 3 users or so. Les…

That doesn't really work on pay-per-click type models. You need to be acquiring 100+ customers before you can really measure properly.
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