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Comment by tangue | Hacker News Reader

I work in a mid-size company where "the computer guy" manages the Facebook page. One day my boss asked me "WTH does reach mean, you mean with 50 bucks we reached 100 000 people ?" Before replying, I read fb docs, a lot of blogs and for me it was gobbledygook. I said it was marketing bullshit and that we should focus on conversion rates. I felt guilty. Impostor syndrome kind of guilty. Until now.

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I'm part of a small grant writing consulting firm, and we tried advertising through Constant Contact's Ad Launcher program. We only want to reach nonprofit executive directors and some heads of public agencies (for example, housing authorities or cities managers). Facebook advertising was complete garbage for us, or, alternately, none of us could target the ads properly—including me. We got a fair number of "leads" but virtually none were qualified clients.

Adwords used to work really well, but its effectiveness has declined in recent years.

We've tried finding a LinkedIn consultant without any luck.

Have you considered highly targeted value based cold emailing?

The HN community may be weary of sending / receiving unsolicited email but if you provide massive value upfront and only contact prospects who would get 2x+ ROI from your product/services, you will not be seen as spam and will convert a good % of the prospects.

I've run a lot of these type of campaigns and the key is to:

A) Only target prospects who have a real need for your product/service and have the budget for it

In your case, I would go on different grant websites and add their grant recipients to your prospect list. This way, you only target organizations who actively use grants.

B) Do a bit of work for them to provide upfront value in your cold email

In your case, research a list of grants they're eligible for (you can share the same list to nonprofits in the same space) and provide unique insights about these grant givers are looking for based on your experience. Your value upfront + value ideas will open the conversation and naturally lead to prospects asking about about how you can help them.

You can get an idea of what the initial email could look like here: http://www.artofemails.com/sales-freelancer#writer

I'm an executive at a nonprofit and I delete all unsolicited email unopened. I just don't have time for it. I don't know how typical I am (small organization and it's part time for everyone involved)

Ex-agency advertiser and consultant here. Wanted to provide some thoughts. I agree, Facebook targeting alone wouldn't work quite well. In this case, I would probably utilize FB/GDN as retargeting platforms which would then probably yield some results. Problem here is you would need to get first-party data. LinkedIn as you mentioned would be a decent avenue since you can target specific careers, however I would actually rely on the sales side to start building the list. Of which, you can start generating lookalikes (I always question lookalikes because the algos are "proprietary", but everything warrants a test to see results). Google Search will be good here too with a good set of keywords.

Unless you only want to do nonprofit/public agencies there is also a market for grant writing for small businesses. They are SBIR/STTR available from most (all?) grant funding agencies and are often how scientific startups get initial funding. Maybe these are considered not qualified candidates for your approach, but something to consider.

>> I said it was marketing bullshit and that we should focus on conversion rates.

I always say the same thing when people are buying FB ads. Doesn't matter how people you reach, how people are you converting?

Reminds me of an article that came out in 2010 comparing their add platform to a Ponzi scheme:

http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme

It also references PG's rant about how Yahoo! was doing the same thing in his 2010 article:

http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

PG's article is looking back at the state of the internet in the late 90's. His claim is that back then most internet advertisers were themselves VC-funded, which made the whole thing a ponzi scheme.

The first two ads I'm seeing right now in my news feed are Walmart and Banana Republic. I don't think 2016 is anything like 1998.

Yea, the only reason I ever pay attention to reach is when I have ads that are converting and I want to try and expand them. Reach tells me if I can just increase the budget/bid or if I'll need to find a new audience.

Even if the impression data is 100% accurate -- how does an impression in the FB sidebar compare to an impression in a commercial during a TV show, or a product placement in a TV show? How would you even begin to measure?

Dont affiliates get paid purely on click throughs? No conversion required? So reach is a useful metric.

>> Dont affiliates get paid purely on click throughs? No conversion required?

No, not all. I'd be a billionaire by now if this was true.

I've been in the affiliate business for 11 years and so far I've yet to come across any decent program that paid out just for clicks. Everything is conversion-based. For good reason - generating clicks is trivial and dirt-cheap, if you don't have to worry about conversions.

I found a few click-based programs a few years back. Turns out they were just monitoring conversions on the backend anyway, and dropping all non-performing affiliates.

Interesting I thought it was the affiliates job to drive traffic towards the business and the business job to do the conversion. i.e. with sales and whatnot.

So, I see, the affiliate is responsible for driving 'quality' traffic towards a business.

It seems like industries like gambling and smoking and other vice industries would be the best place to be then?

I didnt mean that as dengrative. I hope it didnt seem that way. I was actually pretty interested because I was looking to possibly try out affiliate marketing myself.

To echo the other explanation, you have 2 main types of payouts. Lead Generation and Performance (conversion).

In some contexts a click through might count as a lead, but most of the time you need something called a "partial", which some sort of customer information. Be it an email, phone number, address, etc, that the user willing submits.

Most affiliate programs are based off conversion because unqualified leads could quite literally be worth nothing to the business.

The amount the affiliate earns from each also varies greatly. Clicks would be a few cents, partials potentially a few $, conversions tens of $.

Depends on the affiliate program; Amazon pays affiliates per conversion (at various rates).

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