Facebook ads: spent $1000, got 20 clicks and 0 sales
Is that for real? Is everyone else's experience with Facebook advertising similar?
Is that for real? Is everyone else's experience with Facebook advertising similar?
Facebook ads for me are "anti-ads". They associate the product with really bad feelings through poor contextualization.
I'm routinely surprised that despite me talking openly about my interests, I just don't get relevant ads. On one of my most frequently used sites (about basketball), the ads this week have been all womens fashion. I've not searched womens fashion and my wife doesn't use my laptop or phone. Waste of ad money.
I have come to understand advertising a lot better since I asked, while looking at some lingerie ad, "Who would ever want to wear something like that?" and someone replied "This ad is for your spouse who wants to see you in this."
The same reason that underpants come packaged with pictures of hunky guys on the front. The guys aren't there for the men wearing the underpants, so presumably they're there for the women buying them.
They don't crop the faces off the model's picture only for costs. They don't have a face so that it's easier to project yourself with said body.
Meanwhile, I research hiking trips almost every day of the year, talk online about hiking frequently, and I can't remember seeing a single ad for hiking gear or anything remotely related.
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/22210-facebook-unsponsored
Fixed it for me. Web-only, but I just removed the icon from my phone's home screen and my FB usage went way down, which I think is a good thing.
My background: I spent a couple years optimizing Google PPC campaigns as a full-time professional when I was at a digital marketing agency. I held Adwords certification for a couple years. I added this so people don't think I just couldn't figure out how to do PPC in general.
You can most definitely not set up your first campaign, pick the first targeting criteria that comes to mind, and expect good results with a positive ROI within the same day. If you don't keep at, it of course you are going to walk out with the idea that Facebook Ads don't work.
Source: Spent a six figure amount on Facebook over the course of two years.
I have actually literally done this. Just took a stab at an audience, got sales that justified the ad right away.
But we're in a great position with profit margins. They're hand assembled craft items that people generally buy for gifts or weddings, so cost to make is low and sell price is pretty good. Businesses that require high volume on low margins would have a much worse time.
Since the items integrate the buyer's photo, people also often use them as memorials of dead people, but we didn't specifically target that. Yet.
(1) Audience. We created a lookalike audience based on the attributes of our high spenders, which outperformed all previous attempts by a significant margin. I appreciate this option is not going to be available to businesses with no existing customer base.
(2) Tracking. Given the majority of our ads are served on mobile, but convert on desktop or iPad, only Facebook is able to join up the impression and transaction. Previously we had expected to be able to see the attribution in Google Analytics.
Yeah. It's called "Facebook Fraud". See a real live experiment someone did, to figure out the true reach and ROI on Facebook Advertizing. => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag I too did a similar experiment using a pre-paid Visa card (for 50$) so that FB doesn't keep charging my Credit Card and/or lets it get stolen from bad security practices. My results were similar to the guy in the Youtube Video.
Facebook's likes and "reach" are mostly automated or from in-house click-farms in South-east asia (think India, Vietnam, Phillipines etc)
Couldn't be more obviously a scam if it was twirling a waxed moustache.
I can't wrap my head around why someone would run a bot farm to click on my FB ads. It's not like AdSense, where they're getting a cut. I've read a theory it's to hide the bot accounts from Facebook's bot-detectors. But if people like in your experience can easily ID the obviously fake accounts, FB can (using the same criteria you mentioned).
I get FB has moral hazard to allow bot clicks, because they get paid. But if they're so sophisticated as to require fake engagement on ads (which is why I care -- I'm getting charged!), wouldn't they also be monitoring the simple heuristic you provided?
This could be explained by Facebook requiring bots to make them money to not get banned, but I don't think there's sufficient evidence for such a conspiracy just yet.
In the end, all I care about is how much I put into FB ads, and how much directly attributable revenue that generates. The fraud might hide otherwise profitable campaigns (ones that don't break even), but frequently this isn't the primary concern. (My concerns are usually, "does this part of Lake Facebook have any fish I can catch?", followed by the step 2 of optimizing the campaign to get a positive ROI.
In order to be not detected as bots, they need to behave like humans. Hence, they like and visit websites that they have no special interest in. Think of it this way: 50% of what they click is just something random, other 50% is what their masters programmed them to do.
This really doesn't have to do anything with Facebook. There are companies in Russia and India that sell likes, follows, etc. These bots then have to fake their identity and as a result they like stuff that you pay for as Facebook advertiser. I am sure Facebook does something to mitigate this and block the bots but it's a never-ending game for them and those who sell fake like/follows/etc.
Sorry, but Facebook is not looking for a solution. I should've made it clearer in my response, that the like and click farms are managed by Facebook themselves.
They (the Ads Team) moved the click-farms and fake likes in-house after discovering other shady companies that were doing this. Then I think they realized how lucrative it was to their share price and quarterly revenues bottom-line so they went with it.
And even if the accounts are fake, they were likely created to sell followers/likes, not to click ads. Clicking on things just shows activity.
Man, I can't wait for Silicon Valley to come back next season lol
So you've personally been served something like 20 000 targeted (!) ads on Facebook, if not more. Have you ever intentionally clicked one? I sure haven't.
Retargetting works okay for us, nothing amazing but at the same time it isn't throwing money away.
What's interesting, though, is that the company I work for does a lot of repeat business. So I don't think we actually pick up many new customers. It's more that the ads encourage our existing customers to visit us again. They may not even click on the ad.
That's not what TV ads are for, and IMO for the same reason not what FB ads are for. They are however both excellent brand advertising mediums. And brand advertising spending is HUGE, therefore FB is worth a gazillion dollars. People don't buy Coke or Nike or Tide because of an ad they remembered seeing, they buy them because of ALL the ads they forgot they saw.
I just spent $150 today buying a product online I had never before considered or researched, from a company I knew very little about, thanks to an (organic) tweet in my Twitter feed.
So…it does happen, if the timing is right. :)
I didn't get it though. Poor Deprived Child.
Anyway, I always wonder about the brand advertising thing. Do I buy stupidly expensive razor doodads? Sure. Why? Well, I use the same brand my dad did. He bought me the first one and I don't really go in for change, so I've stuck with it. I can logically acknowledge that it's dumb, but here I am yearly spending £30 on razors with more blades than can possibly be necessary.
Coke? I guess I had it somewhere for the first time, I like the taste. I don't think I buy it because of the advertising, I buy it because I like it. Why don't I buy own brand stuff? It tastes different. Would I prefer the own brand stuff if I'd started on that and was used to it? I suspect that is true, so for me it feels like the massive win is in being the first product that I use.
Surely when I go to the shops and pick something off the shelf that I have zero context for: What did family buy? What do friends buy? Is there a brand that somehow jumps out as attractive (advertising works!). But if a first mover gets my social circle to use and approve then that's going to be way more powerful than a shit ton of facebook ads down the line
Just my thoughts.
Can anyone tell me why razors are better?
I guess they remove your manly stubble if you're into that, but my clippers keep me going for another day easily :P
The global brand ad spend is >$400 Billion a year! It's about 10x bigger than the "transactional" advertising market (Google CPC, coupons, etc). Brand is a very ephemeral almost artsy thing though, and it's not easily broken down into metrics (probably why Google didn't focus on it). Building a brand takes a lot of time and ad impressions to build up. Consider full page magazine ads or most bigger TV commercials; they often don't have a immediately obvious conversion ask, they're more about establishing a perception of something over time.
If you look back to the beginning of commerce, there were no brands. You would go down to the bazar or church to ask around and find out the best grain farmer or milk producers or whatever. The butcher you trusted might say "Oh go see the Quakers, they have the best oats!" That reputation became brand over time as commerce got more complex. Eventually they stuck a picture of a Quaker on the bag of oats to associate a certain expectation of quality or price or consistency with their products. Brand is really sticky too. Once you make that choice as a young adult to buy Tide detergent, or Gillette razors, or Honda cars or Nike shoes, its very likely you'll keep buying Tide, Gillette, Honda, or Nike. The lifetime brand customer value is very high even though the marginal profit on each purchase might be relatively low.
Im just suggesting essentially that the FB news feed is the new TV; a passive state where you "flip though the channels" consuming entertainment, and that's an ideal place to present a brand message. The fact that a FB advert fills the users' mobile screen for a few seconds as they scroll is analogous to how TV commercials interrupt a show for a short period.
I feel like the entire ad-tech industry is a house of cards that is bound to topple over at some point.
There are just specific types of campaigns you don't do using FB and if you're not experienced you most likely burn money.
Yes, it's very possible to throw money into a hole with advertising. If you're selling something people don't want, targeting the wrong people, or have ads that don't work with your audience then you'll get nothing back.
Buying advertising isn't a guarantee. Lots of people with little advertising experience would do good to seek out tools and advice to get started.
Still nothing to brag about, but money on adwords is definitely money wasted
Advertise to people who are already interested in your type of product in places they may be looking for something new. Games at Gamestop/IGN etc, specific subreddits, books at goodreads, camping/hiking stuff on hiking boards.
By blocking all ads, because I am not going to buy anything from an ad anyhow, I'm not being counted towards your bill, which makes things cheaper for you and more pleasant for me.
You're welcome.
I'd love an easy option to only include ads on sites that I trust, or that do ads well, and some reliable metrics surrounding that. Then content producers could get some feedback on "ad acceptance rates" and create better user experiences.
Now that I think about it, one of the most obnoxious things about online ads isn't that they are eerily intelligent, but that they are still mostly dumb forms of broadcast.
Usually direct response marketing (like ads to buy a game) is paid per click, so you weren't getting people charged before you started ad blocking, when you weren't clicking on the ad anyways.
And as a beside, people typically don't do direct response marketing to engineers, because it's known they don't click on ads and they're better marketed to through referrals from other engineers and online content (like this article).
There are def ways to make it work, but it's not an easy thing. If I were to try again, I'd make an audio-less video.
If you don't have good email lists, have the money to throw at ads to figure out your ad groups / demographics (just because purple fish people are your #1 customers doesn't mean they buy things off of facebook ads), and don't have a whole ecosystem (landing pages, cross platform re targeting, etc), its an uphill battle that even the pros can't always get working right.
Good on you for trying. Back when I ran ads, a common story from small clients was "I spent $50 - $200 and didn't get any sales, so I figured it wasn't for us" - At least you figured out it wasn't for you, or it wasn't for your budget/time scale.
The initial attempt was a massive fail, we wasted about £3K on facebook ads to generate about £300 in sales.
Following season we focussed on TV ads and generating lots of reviews from our existing happy customers. We then gave facebook another attempt at the end of the season and generated as much sales and traffic as all of the tv advertising for about £3k of facebook ads.
The primary difference was knowing who our customer is - which we learned from the TV ad customers, you can probably learn from your Kickstarter backers. For all of the TV generated sales we got reviews and sent out surveys to each customer. From this, we learned 1. What people loved about the product (which we could use is ad copy) and 2. Who they were and why they purchased.
This allowed us to create very targetted facebook ad campaigns and hence the improved ROI. Facebook is excellent at generating very cheap traffic but only when you get the audience dialed in.
Also, read anything written by Nick Kolenda (http://www.nickkolenda.com/) amazing stuff.
Our best advertising bang has for years been our blog: http://www.seliger.com/blog, in part because many of the topics we write about are also the kinds of search strings people interested in hiring us tend to use.
"I'm going to lose all of this, aren't I?"
In their quest to reduce the friction to people's wallets Google and FB in some ways portray it as clicking a few buttons, creating a couple ads, selecting some suggested targets and you'll make a ton of money right off the bat. And perhaps that used to work to some degree.
The reality is that professionals tend to change or disable most of the defaults because they don't perform well or have other issues. We then go in implementing tried and tested best practices, knowing full well performance will still suck initially and that we have a long, expensive road of testing and optimization before we have things dialed in.
It is a tough business challenge because to some degree it is like trying to cram something simplistic like Paint into a hugely technical and complex platform like Photoshop. You just wanted to draw a damn cat, but there are all these confusing menus and tool bars, these weird layer things, and before you know it you've wasted an afternoon and end up just paying someone to draw it for you before you waste more time.
Downloading a free App is a lower hurdle than buying a card game, so it doesn't surprise me that the author didn't see many conversions. I have read that if your customer acquisitions costs are less than or equal to the money you expect to make off of them during your first year with the customer (supposing a subscription model, not unlike a card game with expansion packs), then you are doing well. The author has seen that his customers have often become repeat customers, so it may be ok to expect that $17.76 is an ok price to pay per converted user, so long as you expect some larger percentage of them will come back for expansion packs.
Some notes: DUDE! it took me WAY TOO LONG to figure out where to buy your game! The link to the product is at THE VERY BOTTOM of your Medium article. PUT IT AT THE TOP WHERE YOU MENTION IT FOR THE FIRST TIME (sorry for yelling). Make it easy for people to find and buy your game!
I have made quite a lot of money (and lost quite a lot in the beginning) advertising on Facebook ads in the past. Just because you have a lot of experience with Google Search PPC doesn't mean you'll have success with Facebook, and visa versa. It depends very much on the product, how broad or niche the appeal is, the price point, the approaches you've tried.
You need to know the target demographics of who your customer is, and Facebook is one of many cost effective avenues to reaching certain types of people. You need to be creative in creating great ad images, ad copy, a good landing page, and measuring actions that tie directly to increased revenue.
These are all basic common sense things, but I have yet to see someone's campaign that didn't have some obvious flaw that set them up for failure. There are a lot of ways to fail and only a few ways to succeed.
What is creepy is that when my in-laws were visiting for the first time I had a American Express ad with Tina Fey congratulating me on meeting my in laws for the first time.
$2,300 on marketing is peanuts, so we believe is worth it to be able to directly contact 7,300 people who expressed interest in our business. These people are also liking and sharing our posts.
Basically, the procedure is the following:
post is shown to a small minority
while a proportion of the people seeing it engages with your content:
show the content to more people
That small minority decides the future of your post. If you have non-genuine likes that are not interested in your content at all (as in, not engaging with it), but they see the post first, you're gonna have to spend money to promote posts.
BUT, if you have an existing customer list (like yourselves), FB gives you an option to upload those existing customer emails and it will do some AI matching to find the appropriate customer demographic pools? From the tutorial I read, this was the only chance you'd have to get any sort of traction on your campaign right out of the gate.
Disclosure #1 : I've never run a Facebook ad campaign in my life just read several tutorials regarding running a successful campaign.
Disclosure #2: I don't remember where I read this information, but given the fact that FB knows everyone's interests (directly and indirectly from statuses and likes), their algorithmic assessment of who should see the ad could be worth trying.
The trick is keeping the cost of testing as low as possible. 100 $1 campaigns are going to have a better return than 1 $100 campaign.
Tldr; don't do Facebook ads if your not doing a hype and if don't want to give things away for free
If you only want useless likes locked in on Facebook, you should do go all on. Remember, you can't easy notify the people who liked your page even though you payed for them
https://medium.com/@cliffordoravec/expect-everything-to-be-u...
That being said, if the profit margin on the items wasn't so high it would be far worse. We're in a particularly good position that way. But on the other hand I haven't done alot of analytics or improvement on the ads either.
People ignore ads. 1 year I was simply mentioned on DesignMilk.com and my calendar sold out. The following year I paid $300 to advertise at the top of DesignMilk.com and didn't get a single sale. That's what really made me realize advertising is highly unwanted.
When I ask around to other inventors and sellers of physical products, Advertising is just a waste (except if you're selling a high priced item that can easily make the money back on a few sales). It's a suckers game if you're like me, selling a low cost item at high volume. If the advertising worked for all these businesses they would keep doing it. They don't. They run a few campaigns, advertise for a bit, watch it fail, then leave, and the next sucker takes their place. Unless you're one of those big box stores that advertise every week. But you are not walmart or target. You do not make millions in revenue a day. You cannot afford to run full color catalog ads bundled with newspapers every single week.
Also, don't let flash sales fool you. Back when I sold my large format physical paper calendar on Fab.com (back when it was big, it went bankrupt and reorganized due to... spending too much on advertising and not enough revenue, ironic isn't it) I sold out in less than 1 month. All 300 units sold out at $15 each. When they reorganized I was literally ruined. They no longer took in calendars like mine. I was stuck selling on Amazon.com and Ebay.com and Etsy.com and sold just a few units.
But man was the journey worth it. I lost thousands but I learned enough to justify it.
Because of this it seems incredibly obvious to me that it'll almost certainly be unprofitable until you've done a lot of work to optimise your campaign (as you're competing with bids against people who have optimised their campaigns) and also probably be incredibly unprofitable if you're not a full time professional digital marketer specialising in facebook ads (because that's who you're most likely competing against for eyeballs).
Yet I see average punters throwing tiny budgets around and failing at facebook used as evidence that facebook advertising is garbage on a regular basis.
Keep in mind that Facebook ads are more like display ads than search ads - users don't necessarily have a specific intent when getting the impression, so they're less likely to give you a direct response.
On the other hand, most of the users we got from Facebook were a kind of "freebie hunters". As soon as they saw it would be necessary to pay a monthly fee to use our services (It's an app! Am I really supposed to pay for this?), most of them disappeared.
In the end, as someone has already mentioned here, Facebook seems to be a really good place to advertise free stuff or products that can naturally trigger some emotional response (Look at this lovely products made by this grandma)... and maybe just them.
We've noticed that every time we stopped the ads, or changed the targeting parameters/audience, it would take a while for Facebook to get back to the same results.
p.s The lead cost was that high because we were selling $200k land + $500k houses from a small tropical country to US consumers that may have never even heard of that country.
I've only used Facebook ads to have a bit of fun and boost a picture of my cat[1]. He got a couple of likes after I'd spent about 50 cents, which pretty much achieved my goal.
[1]https://www.facebook.com/gerrytuxedocat/posts/12184708481998...
This is optimising for sending visitors to my website though. If you focus on page likes or soemthing, then it's not likely you'll get very good off-site CTR
The bounce rate alone from Facebook ads was just under 3x that of Google ads - around 90%. I'm assuming a lot of Facebook ad clicks are accidental.
I have to say, though, a lot of the stuff advertised on Facebook and Instagram seems kind of dodgy. Unless I am just being targeted for dodgy stuff by their algorithms.
But many people make money, too.
The first mistake is thinking "how hard could it be?"
(But tbh. that was some years ago when the advertising stuff was new to FB ... so maybe it got better by now).