I’m considering advertising our newsletter, which is a DRIP campaign for our product, on Facebook.
Thier estimates are 3 to 6 clicks per dollar.
I’m wondering how expensive fb clicks are vs. AdWords. We normally pay .50 to 1 per click on adwords with very low conversions to sales.
Recently I’ve done remarketing campaigns on FB with their custom audiences capability. Pretty cool and cheap. However I didn’t see the ROI I wanted.
FB traffic is cheap, but I’ve never been able to get it to convert. I have heard of others that have good success as long as you find the right target audience, but be prepared to be frustrated until you do.
I tried a tiny ad campaign on Facebook recently. It was remarkably easy to setup, to configure payment, and to monitor. But the ROI wasn’t there so I didn’t do it again.
@Clay_Nichols - you may want to hit up Vincent over at http://www.growthninja.com/. He’s a digital nomad / bootstrapper type - good dude. I’ve chatted with him about facebook ads but haven’t worked with him yet - planning to though if/when I go after facebook ads.
He has had some success with some B2B software clients.
I think his packages start at around $3k if I recall correctly.
Thanks a ton for the mention, Kalen!
A couple questions, @Clay_Nichols:
Do you know your customer LTV?
Also, do you know out of 100 email subscribers, how many will turn into a sale?
Depending on those two numbers, I could get a decent idea of whether or not a FB ad campaign will be worth running.
I tried FB ads in late 2014 with a nightclub event (mentioned on these forums long ago). I thought I had it laser targeted: it was narrowed down to a single city in Australia, appropriate nightclub demographic, and only people who liked a very obscure genre of music. (In short, you had to have liked the Eurovision Song Contest Facebook page or an ‘obscure’ European artist like Lordi or Loreen to see our ad). Facebook’s targeting options were excellent.
However, it blitzed through impressions extremely quickly, much faster than Facebook’s calculations had anticipated. (From what I can remember, FB gave us no option to pay-per-click, otherwise I definitely would have used that.). We got zero clicks from any impressions based on our server analytics, though FB insisted we’d got clickthroughs that our server never saw. Either way, we definitely didn’t sell any tickets from those ads & I stopped the campaign before it blew through our small budget. At least with the Google Adwords ads we ran, pay-per-click meant we paid virtually nothing to Google for low clickthroughs!
Those are great questions. Not comfortable sharing my numbers here. And, honestly, I don’t have statistically valid number for the newsletter yet. Your question helped refocus me so I realize that.
But also it made me realize that our newsletter “cycle” hasn’t gotten the the “sell” yet. (The first few issues teach, then we start teaching things they could do, instead, with our software.)
So it makes me realize that I need to get cracking on the newsletter before advertising the newsletter.
The newsletter so far has made $.035 per subscriber (yes, 3.5 cents). But 90% of those names are old. Newer subscribers are more engaged (higher CTR, Opens,etc.)
So… I need to mature my newsletter FIRST.
I’m resurrecting this thread because over the last three weeks I’ve been running Facebook ads, and I’m getting an excellent ROI. I find myself now recommending that people try Facebook ads.
Unlike my last attempt at Facebook ads, I spent time learning to do this well.
I’m using precise targeting, a dedicated landing page that I’ve honed over months as part of my general marketing effort, and a call to action that offers a clear benefit to the customer.
The Facebook ad management software seems to be improving rapidly. The process of creating adverts is easy, cheap, and quick.
Is there any resource (book/blog/etc) that you would recommend?
A blog with pics (or graphs), or it didn’t happen!
Challenge accepted. I’ll try to write about this later this week.
None specifically. The biggest gain I’ve had has come from focussing for the last four months on improving my marketing, and the facebook ads success is a culmination of everything I’ve been doing during that four months.
Indeed - they used to not allow you to target people who matched one interest AND another interest (would only do OR), but I’ve heard they do now. This I imagine is powerful is will probably give me enough reason to retry again.
