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Growing A Facebook Page from 50k to 500k in 6 months (27)

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The current situation:

My football (soccer) website (Arsenal FC-related) needs more quality traffic from tier 1 & 2 geos and after working with several big Facebook fan pages to post our articles on a CPM basis I need to focus on growing my following in these geos. The FB page is up to 50k followers now and is starting to drive more traffic and can be a useful traffic source for affiliate offers in the future once I've established a huge following.

I've mainly gotten this far from sharing our content on other big pages plus I've started to run FB ads that has helped boost our following in the top geos.

I've spent ~$1k on FB ad spend so far promoting my page to UK, US, Germany, France, Netherlands, Scandinavia. Adding lots of interests like 'Arsenal FC' and a host of their players names. At one point I had an ad running at $0.05c per like which seemed OK. However I had to pause for a month or so, but when I resumed it was struggling to get down to $0.11c, so I added a few more images to test and the best I got to was $0.10c. Ughh.

I then came across this post from IamAttila

He suggests running separate adsets for different creatives and running broad to start with. I know this is for promoting an offer, but I wondered if I should be setting up my campaigns like this so all ads I run get a fair run. I tried that with 'Arsenal FC' the only interest, and it went pretty awfully. Best was like $0.17c after $100 spend across the 6 adsets.


Question 1: Am I best to run page promotion campaigns like affiliate campaigns mentioned above with different ads setup in different adsets? Or just simply under one adset?

Question 2: Should I try narrowing down the adsets with more 'interests' included? And if so should they then be broken into new adsets from the broad ones?


Is anyone able to offer some insight here?


I don't have a huge budget right now. But if I'm able to get down to $0.05c per like or less then I can inject more cash to help me reach my goal.


NB:

Also, I've added a FB pixel with a 5m audience to run some ads too. However the tier 1&2 geo ratio isn't fantastic but hopefully it can attract cheaper likes?!

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The countries you are targeting are all very expensive tier 1 markets.

Why not add more countries? In countries like saudi arabia, egypt and UAE you can get up to 1,000 likes (not fake) for 4$.

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Because my site & page needs to grow traffic from Tier 1 & Tier 2 countries specifically to help improve the site quality. These other countries that are cheaper don't help to improve my sites's CPM or will convert for my aff offers. I already get a lot of African traffic.

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Which countries are in tier 2 for you?

Dont underestimate the middle east. Lot of purchasing power there - and there market is not oversaturated with ads. Last year and this year, the middle east is definitely a gold mine for advertising.

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Hello,

first thing to do, in case you're not already doing so is this : https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...pages-for-FREE With posts that get a lot of engagement, there will be a lot of likes from people who are not fans of your page yet.

Next, FB works the same as other traffic networks to SOME EXTENT - one of them would be that in order to work in a most effective way, you cannot mix everything together.

How are your campaigns setup right now? Do you have several GEOs targeted in one FB ad set? Several age groups? Mixed interests?

Pretty much all the time, some target groups will perform better than others, dig deeper into your data and focus more on those targets that perform better for you.

You might also want to focus on the images you are using more, facebook is pretty anal when it comes to this - but try to feature a hot big breasted Arsenal fan in your posts and the likes will definitely be cheaper

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These are geos I have been targeting, mainly all 'Tier 1' maybe with the exception of Malta. These are based on the best adsense CPM performing countries over the years:

Australia, Canada, Germany, Denmark, Finland, France, United Kingdom, Ireland, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, United States.

I will certainly take your note about the middle east and definitely test that out.


Thanks Matuloo. I did actually only recently come across your post - very useful! I have been giving that a crack on a regular basis.

That's the thing, in relation to Question 1 I asked originally, I wanted to discuss what the best way is to setup the campaign. As I did have some promising results when I first started the 'page promotion' under ONE campaign and ONE adset and with several images and had chucked all of the above countries plus lots of interests straight into the mix. But perhaps I just got lucky?

It was difficult to extract too much data from the insights tbh. So I guess thats where the advantage of breaking them into separate campaigns will help.

So I'm assuming it's probably best to create separate campaigns for each country? And have different adsets for different ages & interests?

As all our content is in English I figured I'd keep all of the ad copy in English..

. >> NICE! I'll definitely give this a good go.

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I noticed one thing when running FB campaigns that target a lot of GEOs - some of them are always cheaper and you will get lot's of like from those. The FB algo sees an opportunity there, they know they can spend large part of your budget there but there is low competition from some reason ... so the result will be a lots of likes from that GEO. The same happens when you target broad with anything - there are always overlooked targets, geos or whatever and if they are part of your broad targeting, FB will put emphasis on those ... maybe that's how you got the cheap likes initially. Try to check out the breakdown of your fans, in case you see unrealistically large % of like from some GEOs in relation to their size, this could be the reason.

Another reason for the higher cost might be the size of your audience, the longer you target a limited audience, the higher the cost per action will become naturally.

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Thanks Matuloo. I dug into the data and most of the spend was on the UK, which is fine, however I noticed that my original campaign had a much wider audience 12m (Arsenal F.C plus a whole lot of players ) v 4.7m (Arsenal F.C only).

Anyway. I'm starting from scratch to ensure I do this right.

I've created separate adsets for each geo+device+'angle'. I'm going to start with my key geo first - The UK. Targeting 18-60. All with lots of interests to keep it broad as above. £5 daily budget per adset. Each adset has 2-3 images.

ie:

UK_Mobile_Angle1
UK_Mobile_Angle2
UK_Mobile_Angle3
UK_Mobile_Angle4
UK_Mobile_Angle5
UK_Desktop_Angle1
UK_Desktop_Angle2
UK_Desktop_Angle3
UK_Desktop_Angle4
UK_Desktop_Angle5
...

As the angles are quite generic really, I'm starting with some of these:









QUESTION

1. Is it better to pay by impression or page like?
2. Autobid or run my own bids to start with?


Interested to hear anyones thoughts on the above and any suggestions. Will post some results soon!

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1. I suggest to do by like, makes a bit more clear what a like will cost (and how much you are willing to pay for it)
2. Autobid for quick results, becomes very clear in short time which images/ads have the best CTR.
Make sure if you do autobid, you launch your ads in the morning/early afternoon, so FB has the time to optimize best.

Below your images you have "All Arsenal" as text. Use that space for creative/call to action/informative text. This is a "waste of space" now.
I suggest you also use some other emoticons, for example football related; http://fsymbols.com/facebook/smileys/

The setup of text/spaces is ofcourse different on mobile and desktop. A nice ad on mobile could have lots of white spaces on Desktop, what isn't really attractive so could result in bad CTR. Ofcourse don't make it a jungle full of text and emoticons .

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Thanks mate. Not sure how to edit the 'All Arsenal' text however as it's just taking the name of the page automatically.

I tried adding more emoji's, but most don't actually work. It keeps saying invalid characters when I submit the ad. There are only some that actually work. For example a red circle works, but the white doesn't lol. I added the red circle, and it submitted fine, I edited and tried adding the white and it gave me this (as well as with the football ball emoji too):

"One error was found. Fix this error and save again.
Ads can only contain letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and spaces. Invalid characters: Body of an error/warning message. Title is: The text of this creative contains invalid characters."

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you're not using the PowerEditor, are you ?

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Nope. Ads Manager

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**UPDATE**

So the initial test has been relatively successful with the UK, I paused most of the desktop campaigns after £10 spend as all but one were £0.30+ per like which is far too expensive! Mobile performing much better, and at the end of the day, I'm mainly concerned about getting likes no matter where they come from. Keeping one desktop adset running however to see if it improves.

Unfortunately one of the best performing ads (the first one shown in the post ^^ that reads 'join the Arsenal FC community') was later rejected after a closer review from fb, so will add a similar variation and tweak the wording slightly.



Next steps:

1. Monitor the current adsets and see if I can improve them by adding in more variations.

2. Launch in 5 of my other key geos.

3. Launch my custom audience campaign.

QUESTION.

1. Any 'best practices' for adding in new adverts into performing or underperforming adsets? Or just chuck one-two ads in and see if they get any traction? Or is it best to create a new adset and start fresh with the variations?

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How are you planning to monetize the page once you reach your goal??

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Launch new ad sets, also for same geo! Your first ad might be rejected bacause of too much text in the image?

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The primary source of income from the page will be driving traffic to articles on the news website, but I will also be running betting & streaming offers directly on the page too.

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QUESTION

I know some advertisers can still create an unpublished post with a video AND add a CTA such as 'learn more' and then post it onto a page, I know someone who can do it fine and easily, however I cannot. Is it because my page is under a business account? I tried removing my page from business but made no difference. I contacted facebook and they said that you can only use the CTA button for adverts that are boosted and not for posting organically. I've even tried setting up a new fb account to see if that worked - but to no avail.

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In your business manager, go to Page Posts -> Create Link post. Here you can do it.
Let me know if you need any more help

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Thanks. Didn't quite work for some reason as it appears FB has removed the function for advertisers (maybe just relatively new ones?). But I can just boost a video, add a CTA and just pause it shortly after and the CTA button remains.

UPDATE: I launched a series of campaigns, continuing with the UK, launching US & AU but all were very expensive. x2 or x3+ what I was paying for likes when I was running a broader campaign with all of these geos plus more into one. So I've since relaunched a new campaign, under one adset targeting my top geos. It's doing okay from the early signs and is saving a significant more than running one campaign per geo.

I also ran a campaign on my sites Pixel, was getting likes for under £0.01 which is lovely but pretty much all traffic is from Africa. Which isn't solving my issue on traffic quality.

Will continue to test some different campaign ideas and launch in the middle east too.

Page is up to 72k likes now.

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I am pretty sure buying likes from FB will result in a lot of fake ones. Probably better to boost content posts I think...
edit: check this out; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag!!!

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Thanks mate. I have seen an increase in engagement as I've boosted a lot in the UK and have seen some promising stats through to my article. I like the idea of promoting posts to be honest as it will be a double whammy - getting more fb likes and page views on the site. But I know it will be more expensive. Time to get testing I guess and ensure I capture the likes with a popup to like my fb page or similar.

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Make sure the posts you are going to promote have a viral thing, this way it will be much cheaper. Some sleezy news about a Arsenal player or such...

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Thanks. To clarify, are you talking about boosting an article posted on the page or just a facebook post with an image / something viral?

ALSO - is there some more indepth ways of analyzing where page likes are coming from? The standard stats on the fb page are very vague and don't show who have liked the page from invites. Would be incredibly valuable information...

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Boosting a viral-ish article I suggest to do try indeed.... not sure how in-depth you can track likes back, I think it's still pretty vague.

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Nice share

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I like this thread, crosses over to some other style of value/info site.
a lil different from your everyday STM adult/casino fb threads
are you a fan of arsenal particularly? or picked them just because of popularity?

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Only saw this thread cos it got bumped, but I'm a massive Arsenal fan. Or was, tough times now.

Not that involved with Arsenal online, but it seems like the Arsenal fanbase is one of, if not, the most web-savvy fanbases, so there should be plenty to target. But there is a *lot* of competition. I'd say reddit and ArsenalFanTV good sources of potential angles of what resonates with the fanbase currently. Otherwise, in terms of viral content, there's a ton you can generate. Constant transfer news (tons on twitter, ranging from pure trash to tenuous), player social media posts, youth player highlights, Wenger's new book coming out, etc. I'd say try angles that are related to current Arsenal trends.

Regarding FB data, have you had a look at Audience Insights? You can create a Custom Audience of those who interacted with your Page which is not precisely what you're asking for but might help.

@eduardo2 Eduardo your name or you an Eduardo fan? Great player. But yeah, agreed, nice to see a different niche.

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