Facebook Newbie Follow-Along - gonna need your help guys (14)
I've been dabbling with Facebook ads over the past couple of days, but not really sure whether I'm doing it all right, so I thought I'd post up my campaign and hopefully get some advice along the way. I also like process which can be repeated, so the offer and whether this makes a profit is kind of irrelevant, but this should help me, and others, understand what needs to be done to launch a fb campaign.
Stage 1: Offer & Target Market
I'm going with an offer I know converts from past experience. It's a baby related lead gen offer and pays out $2 per sign up.
I'm going to target:
- United States (has to be, for this offer)
- females
- age 18-35 (exact match)
- single (my thinking is that single mums are more likely to be lower income, or be more likely to sign up for freebies)
I need some way of identifying mums or mums-to-be, so in the Likes & Interests box on fb, I've put the words "Baby" and "Pregancy".
Note: demographics are actually suggested by the advertiser, so I thought it was a good place to start and can be expanded later.
Estimated reach: 35,020 people.
Suggested bid: 0.52 - 0.91 GBP (0.83 - 1.45 USD)
I've read in a few places here that bidding 80% of the lower end is a fair place to begin, which would be 0.42 GBP (0.67 USD).
Questions
a. Is anything way off in my process so far?
b. Is a reach of 35k too small to begin with?
c. Suggested bid seems ludicrously high to me, but then I'm not used to FB. Am I in the right ball park with my starting bid?
Next Steps
- Find 20 images for ads
- Create 2 headlines and 1 body text
Hey nick,
In regards to your questions here is what I probably would do...
a. Is anything way off in my process so far?
Targetting seems fine but I would split it up into a number of campaigns and spread your age ranges a little like this 18-23, 24-29, 30-35. I find it easier to disect the campaign from the beginning and may help you cut out an age range that isn't converting earlier and helping reduce risk. If for example all of your conversions came from one group the first few days you could pause the rest and just work on that one until you get the profit/roi you want and then go back to the other ages later on to tackle.
This will reduce your target audience and might make it really low but just did a quick check on some interests to target and found a bunch which will deffo help you identify your target demo...
Check out likes & interests like these "i love my daughter, i love being pregnant, i love my son, i love my kids, i love being parent, being a mom, my son, my daughters...." 
- should give you loads of places to start.
b. Is a reach of 35k too small to begin with?
35k isn't too small - it might run out after a few days/week but you don't want to jump in with a massive demo size especially when your learning still. With the changes mentioned in the first answer that should increase - you might have to split up into more age ranges if you don't want too many because checking 18-23 female in the US with those groups I mentioned is almost at 700k and over a million each for the other age ranges...
c. Suggested bid seems ludicrously high to me, but then I'm not used to FB. Am I in the right ball park with my starting bid?
That's around the ball park I expect to see to be honest, it does vary but I don't really take that into account, you might see that increase/decrease with changes. Seen as I have the thinkgs plugged into my facebook getting some data the 18-23 group has a suggested bid of $1.14-$1.91. I tend to bid around 60% of the lowest recommended anyway.
What I would do
Instead of grouping all of those likes & interests into the campaigns why not pick out "i love my son" and tailor the ads around that - you know their female, between xx-xx age and have a son. Get X for your baby son kinda thing, also relate that into the images.
Just an update for pictures, I would find ones with babies being cute, naughty, doing stupid stuff and things along those lines and test them.
Just some keywords ideas: huggies, oshkosh, gerber, cutest baby, (parental keywords in general, etc..)
Also rich's keywords are solid, there may be a lot of 'groups' related to what he mentioned
For targeting i'd make it 23+, and not only target singles. Non single moms love coupons too, and by making it single your killing your reach!
*Your suggested bids are fine, and your next steps are correct. Overall looks like a good plan, just need more people to target. With the right CTR you'll see the suggested bids drop a lot, and then your clicks will be way lower!
Update. Progress is slow as my son is off school sick today...
I've uploaded 20 ads, with one title ($300 of FREE Baby Stuff) and body, each with a different image (shown below).
Targeting females between 23-30, in one of the "I love my..." likes, which has given me a reach of around 110k.
I suppose I just wait and see what happens once (hopefully) approved now? Anything else I need to be doing before I get some data?
Also, my CPC bid is £0.75 across the board (suggested was £0.92 upwards).
So I can set my expectations, what budget do I need to allocate for the initial test? Do I need to wait 100 clicks (£75 / $120) before I can start to lower my bids?
Here are my stats after an hour or so. I submitted 20 ads, but only 7 got through. The others were rejected saying the image was inappropriate. I've re-submitted those.
CTRs are terrible, and traffic is not being spread evenly. I've had two conversions so far.
At what point do you pause or even kill an ad?
Another hour gone and not really improving. I re-submitted the failed ads and 2 more got through, without any changes.
Is it at the stage where I should pause the two ads with 18k and 12k views, to let some of the others get some traffic?
Latest update. A few more hours passed, CTR nothing to write home about. 44 clicks & 4 conversions, giving me an EPC so far of $0.20.
CPC is still £0.53 ($0.87).
What's next steps?
a) Keep adding new ads with different images (highest CTR by the way is the photo of the kid in the watermelon)
b) try a different demographic (ie. still females 23-30, but with different keywords)
I want those 0.2+ CTRs dammit. I just don't have the experience yet to know if this campaign has potential or not.
Your goal at this point is to find high CTR ads to get cheap clicks. launch a few campaings with different angels, and test ALOT of different images. You need to get 0.2+ CTR to get under 0.20 CPC
Thanks Marco.
How many clicks do you run for a test though?
I've spent $37, got 44 clicks, revenue $8.40, best CTR is 0.49%
Should I just pause all those ads in that campaign and test more images, or pause the whole campaign and test a completely new angle (and then, would you test the same images with the new angle, or completely new images?)
Or maybe for the current campaign, just pause the ads with 30k+ impressions to let the other ads get some traffic, as well as adding other images?
I paused the campaign as I couldn't see it being brought back from the dead.
I was targeting the "I love my son" keyword. Thinking more about now, and also looking at the posts on the wall, there are a LOT of people who have much older children but still 'love their son'.
As the offer is really aimed at people with VERY young babies and pregnant women, I think I need to change my targeting. Going to see what I can find around the pregnancy theme, and think of some angles for that.
In terms of the pictures, I will run them again with the new demo, but also get some pics relating to pregnant women.
laters...
Ah yeah I didn't really think about the older 'sons' etc, maybe there is a group like I love my baby boy or something? Or if you can find some keywords that relate to them actually being pregnant I often include a question in the title so you could put "Pregnant?" then go on to saying get bla bla bla... You might have the same problem say someone might have their interest 'I like being pregnant' but put that in when they was actually pregnant which could be years ago.
You could also try to reduce the target audience just to get your feet wet and find out what works.
Keep going!
I'm starting to see why people get so frustrated with FB approvals...
Just had my last batch of ads disapproved: The destination URL of this ad either violates Facebook's Advertising Guidelines or could not be accessed for review.
Fair enough, I suppose I just need to resubmit with the proper URL, instead of my tracking link, and then switch once approved.
HOWEVER, I've also just had an email from my network saying the advertiser has asked them to stop all social network traffic to the offer.
No explanation why.
Guess it's time to find a new offer for a new case study...
$0.20 EPC is pretty good! You can make this work.
Like marco said, your goal here is definitely cheaper clicks, so you need to try new images, more angles and more demos. You've gone through enough images with out any great CTRs so i'd say change the angle up a bit. (Also a new angle usually means new images, since the old images probably won't relate to your new angle)
Just read your last post and you definitely need to change your targeting then! Thats prob why your CTR was so low because your images did look very promising!
I think baby faces will out perform pregnant women.
For your images try a few more ideas:
- babies barfing
- babies beside celebs
- babies doing things they can't actually do
- a baby riding a tiger or something
**weird is usually the key to high CTR (and a lot of weird images can be found by searching around)
*Blah, just saw your most recent post :|
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