Anyone else been tricked by FB advertising?

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This looks insane. My ad reached 8% of the MINIMUM possible reach. This is not to say that the ad couldn’t be improved on my side - that is not the point. The point is that I was promised up to 79K reach, and didn’t get even a 1K reach.

Maybe it is for better? You have a chance to improve your ad based on 1K views.

I’d rather try to run 8 ads of 10K each and select a winner than have 1 at 80K.

(I just came up with an idea of a genetic algo service where an ad is randomly modified on each generation, and the CTR winners get to replicate themselves for the next round. Lotsa small runs until you get the best one, and then boom! Large run with the high CTR!)

I do get your point, but the thing is that I was promised 11K+ views, and got only 1K views

I’ve never had the reach that Facebook ads promised. Seems to be a load of baloney and waste of money to me. Even when I had sales after the ad and I asked where the buyer heard of my app, none of them said Facebook. It was always organic or posts I made on Reddit, etc.

Yeah, I’m slowly getting to that same conclusion myself. I just can’t believe they’re getting away with it…

You may have missed the difference in meaning between the words “promised” and “estimated”.

Not an answer to your question, but…

Facebook advertising (and in fact, anyone paid advertising) is hard to get right. I believe that trying Facebook advertising already, while you are still working on honing your marketing message, is going to be an utter waste of your money.

It would be better to spend some months continuing to adjust your website and trying some basic content marketing. Only when you have a really strong understanding of your marketing angle should you try Facebook advertising. Even then, from all I’ve heard plus my own experience, expect to spend money with no results for the first month or so while you develop an understanding of how to best use Facebook.

We’ve tried Facebook advertising too… it does seem to be less inclined to benefit the advertiser, and more inclined to taking yo cash.

Have you thought about trying advertising on LinkedIn instead? We’ve found it’s a great way to really target your specific audiences, and the conversions have been higher than Facebook for us too.

For B2C LinkedIn doesn’t seem the right place.

I should agree with @SteveMcLeod that it may be a bit too premature to spend money on ads. Maybe only as a gauge tool, but not as a traffic source.

The estimation (on FB advertising) has a minimum and maximum reach. Where do they come up with that stuff? I mean, when it says the audience is, 3M+ viewers, and it says my add will reach 11K-79K, I expect it to reach maybe 30-40K. But when it reaches 1K, that is simply unacceptable.

Yes, I believe you are 100% right about Facebook advertising. That’s why I do small steps, like advertising for a few days and seeing what works. But I will very likely give up on Fb altogether - they will just take your money and give you whatever they want.

Best,
John

Yeah, exactly… Right now, I’m trying reddit. About LinkedIn - I will take a look, but since I want to target photographers/hobbysts, not sure if LinkedIn is the best medium…

Well, they do not know your offer, your past performance, probably even your wording, so from them this range is just an educated guess.

Or, as they say in army, SWAG (“Scientific Wild Ass Guess”), where SWAG estimations are defined as “±100%”.

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