Fan Page Advice: Traffic For My Own Site? (12)
Hey everyone. I'm kind of thinking out loud as I type this and would really welcome any suggestions from those of you that have had success in driving Facebook traffic to their fan pages.
I run a website in the gambling niche which has been performing excellently in recent weeks despite only hitting on average 100 uniques a day.
Average visit times are around 5 minutes with bounce rates a super-low 22%. My mailing list is forever growing and through recently doing a lot of work on my auto-responder sequence my income is quite passive right now.
Traffic pretty much 100% comes from organic search listings and from watching the kind of search terms people are coming in I know my visitors are mainly looking for information on a couple of different subjects. I'd like to open the floodgates to people who "don't know what they're looking for" yet.
Is Facebook the answer? Quite possibly. The possibilities for targeting are immense and I'm sure there must be an army of people interested in what I've got to tell them.
Right now I run a fan page for my site with no activity other than my own posts. I've got a decent amount of zombie likes which a few months back I purchased to obtain a bit of credibility but haven't gone any further than that. I'm unsure what my next step should be.
My objective really is to get people on my mailing list where they receive a very comprehensive free eBook which I know is good at successfully driving people into my sales funnel.
I've just put together an opt-in landing page which very succinctly identifies what the eBook will help them achieve with the option to get it for free if they enter their email address. My plan was to just pay for clicks to this lander.
Should I also be trying to force likes through fangating (new to me but just read about it)? My only concern with this is that that extra step might be a bit too much in combination with the usual opt-in sequence.
i.e.
Like to see this page > Opt in for this eBook > Activate via Email > Activation Confirmed > Get the Welcome Email > Click the Link to the Download Page > Download the PDF
But on the other hand some Likes would be great to try and juice some free publicity to my page.
In having never paid to advertise on Facebook before (or anywhere in fact!) I'm also wondering if anybody can give any suggestions as to what I definitely should not do to avoid the ban hammer from the off. My Ads account will be linked to my regular Facebook account and I'd rather it stays intact but am weary that in the gambling niche I expect you have to be careful what you say!?
Any pointers appreciated!
Another "own product" question - interesting, seems like this is a bit of a trend right now!
I've not tried this flow myself, but my initial thought is that you might find the repeated compliance steps actually work for you. There's some solid psychological research suggesting that getting visitors to comply repeatedly with small steps increases their chances of saying "yes" to larger things - like, y'know, purchases 
Anyone tried something like this?
I definitely think there's an element of that within the running of an Autoresponder to deliver a free gift following Opt-In.
It kinda feels like the user is chasing the gift whilst bouncing between email and website but the way I see it is that those who don't follow through with the steps required to get what you're offering were never really that interested in the first place.
I'll be setting this up in the next few days I think and will likely try and split test a fangate.
Let us know how you get on!
Of course. Here goes:
I decided to go with a Fan Gate since I agree that if somebody likes the page then they subsequently will most likely go all the way with submitting their email address.
Basically I'm looking for people to sign up to my mailing list where they receive a free eBook which will drive them towards a specific product that I recommend. I know from my site stats that this converts.
I don't expect an awful lot from this little adventure. It's mainly for me to get to grips with how Facebook advertising works.
To be honest after submitting my ads for approval I'm actually surprised to wake up this morning and have them all approved.
I did a bit of reading around promoting gambling products on Facebook last night and all I seemed to find was support for the idea that they only prop up the big guys and require a minimum $10,000 - $30,000 monthly spend. Fat chance of seeing that from me!
Anyway - it appears that at least for now - they don't mind giving the little guy a shot at the big time despite the fact I'm promoting a product that bookmakers won't like. Hmmmm.
Please feel free to chime in and criticise my workflow as this is my absolute first ever attempt at paid advertising. I'm also using a $50 coupon obtained from Fiverr to start with.
I've set up 5 different campaigns which each feature One Ad with One Headline and the Same Copy. Each Ad has a different image.
My targeting looks like this:
I've taken this screengrab today actually after the campaign has run and what I've already noticed is that the minimum suggested bid has shot up.
When I kicked off this campaign I put my CPC bid in at about 6p above the minimum at the time.
Here's what happened:
So it looks like Ad 3 was my highest performer with a click-through rate of 0.050% but from that I only got one page like which would gave way to one potential opt-in. From my site stats I can see I had no Facebook opt-ins though so they clearly didn't go for it.
Next up it looks like Ad 2 is in next best standing with a 0.036% click-through rate and achieving one like from two clicks.
It's sleepy time in the UK now so not much going on but I figure I should let this continue to run until I've hit 10k-15k impressions and then make some cuts and adjustments from here on in?
I think it'd also be good to split-test Fangate against No Fangate but that won't be easy to set up to run concurrently as it's literally a Facebook iFrame setting. There's a good chance that people might not want to LIKE a gambling page as it shows up on the Newsfeed?
Would the right thing to do there be to duplicate this campaign once I've built up enough information on these ads and run it without the fangate to keep the stats clean?
Aside from all that - quite excited. I'm losing money sure but it's kinda fun. 
Edit: Not sure what's going on with the images. That second grab is actually a lot bigger but seems to be shrinking when embedded in this post :|
Hmm - I'd be tempted to test some more images there. Those CTRs are going to be hard to become profitable from, and you've got enough data to be reasonably certain they're statistically significant.
Originally Posted by caurmen
For other Facebook Newbies: If you use the Power Editor then make sure you press UPLOAD to save all your changes.
I didn't. So as it turns out my campaigns were left to run till I noticed this morning and my other images didn't even get looked at for approval until just now. This time they were turned around within minutes though which was good.
So although I didn't mean to keep collecting data, here's what happened:
More clicks but a pretty terrible click-through rate across the board. Of them not many Likes are forthcoming to then display the landing page. Really would like to test dropping the fangate and purely monitoring the opt-ins on the site but maybe it's still too soon to do that.
A couple of questions:
1) How many impressions per ad should I looking for to start making sensible conclusions?
2) Is my workflow of setting up one ad in each campaign the best way to go about things or should I be doing something different?
I'd recommend killing ads with no clicks around 1.5k impressions, and cutting based on CTR around 5k impressions. Don't cut anything that has converted, though (to a Like in your case).
Quite an awful start but a few immediate lessons learnt.
The replacement pictures were equally dismal performers which led me to consider whether I should be targeting differently.
I set up a few different campaigns. Each had a slightly different headline / copy with a selection of different creatives.
This time - instead of making a new campaign for each specific ad I grouped 3-4 at a time within each and allowed Facebook the ability to juice what it believed was the most successful one. I'm not sure how I feel about this as I can see that in the case of one campaign group in particular Facebook had already found a winner after 470 and 672 impressions on the other ad. The "optimal performer" had nearly 15,000 impressions thrown at it!
Urgh.
There were no clear winners from this test other and CTR did not surpass the measly 0.57% I had got with one of my ads from the very first bout.
I know I'm throwing money away at the moment as my impressions are gigantic for what I'm actually achieving in CTR.
I figure that next up I should set my budget for each ad with a ceiling equivalent to what 3-4 clicks at max bid would achieve at a CTR of 0.1% in order to cap to 2,500 impressions or so without wasting money on more?
My max bid by the way is ever growing in Facebook suggested amounts. :|
Not really sure where I go next. I've tried targeting users with a particular interest in specific sports programmes. I've also targeted those that follow large high street gambling shops.
This is before I either consider the fact that those who have clicked have rarely liked and those that do aren't appearing to opt-in.
Hmm - seems like your core appeal might not be working here. How many different angles, rather than just images, have you tried so far?
You're right. Only a couple so far. I've got a few ideas how I could switch it up. I'll give it a shot and limit my daily budget while I'm at it.
Any advice how I deal with these increasing maximum bid suggestions? If you ignore them and went low then what would be the result of that? The same goes at the other end of the scale come to think of it. Intrigued how it's all factored in.
The dismal performance continues and nothing has surpassed the CTR of my previous campaigns.
I'm pretty sure using a Fangate for this kind of offer is putting me at a disadvantage because a) People don't like to LIKE gambling pages necessarily and b) The Opt-In comes too soon for the eBook. It kinda feels like I'm asking for an email address before they even understand what I'm trying to promote.
There were some big football games kicking off this Sunday and I decided I would try and explicitly target them as I've seen some big bookmakers do. Facebook didn't approve the ads. That being said they didn't reject them either but rather just left them in limbo until the scheduled times had pretty much expired for them to be relevant anymore.
I do feel that with what I'm advertising it could easily get up the noses of big bookmaker Facebook advertises who are splurging thousands on the site in comparison to my poultry sums. Maybe I'm treading a thin line with this idea and I'm not ready to lose my account just yet.
In any case - I partly wanted to just give this a go for sake of traffic experiment for my existing site but it looks like it might be a bit of a waste of time and money.
I'm using up a $50 coupon at the moment so I'm gonna soak up the rest of that both direct linking to my site or direct linking to my page avoiding the fan gate.
After that's done I think it's time to give normal CPA a try. I'm gonna start my proper adventure on POF where I can keep costs down a bit and have tools on the forum here freely available to help me see what's working for other people already so I'm not just shooting in the dark.
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