Six steps to effective Facebook advertising at $0.01 CPC | Hacker News Reader

Six steps to effective Facebook advertising at $0.01 CPC

dipoll.com

48 pointsnano8115 comments

Unless your startup is targeting teenage girls in third world countries, you shouldn't be trying to simply optimize for low CPC.

You need to be thinking about traffic quality and conversions. The beauty of a fluid marketplace like Facebook Ads(or AdWords, for that matter) is that the cost of traffic will eventually approach its value.

The people clicking these ads are not going to be spending a lot of money on your site, that's why the clicks are so cheap.

If you try this same approach targeting, for example, middle aged women in the US, who have much more purchasing power, you can expect to pay closer to $1 per click.

Note that this post doesn't say anything about conversions or sales.

And if you think you can build a successful business around dirt-cheap clicks from African children, well I've got a few million guaranteed visitors to sell you :)

I believe the effectiveness of Facebook advertising in general depends totally on what you're trying to sell. We tried it briefly for about a three-month stint and didn't get a single conversion.

We targeted engaged women in the 20-30 age bracket within this region for wedding photography. It ran about $250/mo but didn't net one single inquiry whereas our Google ads account for about 40% of all inquiries for our services at half the price.

I hope it's clear that this is targeted to nontraditional Facebook advertisers. Ones that wouldn't advertise at $1 per click, maybe even at $0.10 a click because they aren't running highly targeted ecommerce with $20+ conversions or other usual PPC campaigns. Even sites which actually monetize via AdSense!

Yes, buying ads for a site that runs ads can make money -- if you are converting users from untargetable mystery people to users who indicate their interest in subjects where traditional advertisers are bidding for keywords. Facebook has a lot of potential for this and it's great to see a step-by-step recounting of experience with this method.

A personal anecdote: we tried advertising on Facebook to people aged 30+ who are interested in Catholicism (and other similar keywords) for http://BeadifulRosaries.com/ and had absolutely no luck at all.

We spent a lot of time crafting ads & landing pages but they didn't amount to much. Adwords destroyed them.

Active searching > passive clicking.

So was the problem that fewer people from Facebook converted, or was it just that Facebook had a much lower volume of clicks?

It seems like we could have gotten all the clicks we wanted, but they wouldn't convert.

Did Google Adwords have advertising opportunities like this back when it first started getting traction? Is it still possible to get impressions on bids this cheap for very long tail keywords in Google?

Would love to hear some input from someone more experienced than I.

YES, Google's CPCs were far lower in the past.

NO, it is not possible to a purchase a meaningful number of $0.01 clicks on AdWords today.

I can't view the blog post (HN effect?), but I can say that we used to routinely purchase consumer electronics keywords (ipods, razr) between 2003-2005 and pay between $0.08 and $0.12 per click. Those same keywords today fetch over $1.00 or more. (Well not RAZR, but you get what I mean.)

Whereas on Facebook, I have yet to see CPCs of higher than about $0.45.

So yes, Facebook has a land of low-CPC opportunity. The challenge, of course, is conversion. Google has a proven track record of turning AdWords clicks into conversions. Whereas your average Facebook user who clicks on an ad is less likely to convert. (A good portion of the clicks seem to be accidental, in fact, judging by how quickly users hit the back button.)

My personal feeling is that Facebook advertising will one day grow to rival that of search advertising, but due to this issue of conversion (and purchase intent), other very smart people disagree.

Depends how well you structure your Adwords campaigns and how fast your website is ... etc. Basically with a quality score of 10/10 keyword you can get 0.01 cpc

I'm guessing Step 7 is use images that you don't own....

What struck me here was how effective facebook proved to be for you on the Weekend! To the contrary, my facebook rep encourages me NOT to advertise on weekends because of ... ? what? lower traffic? Or maybe she's trying to keep this a secret?

what volume do you engage in such that you get a personal rep? :)

Unclear how effective this would be when you need to target more narrowly on a certain demographic (i.e. only USA). Still very interesting - will have to try something simple myself.

Even though we targeted broadly over several English speaking countries, we were still getting a big chunk of impressions (judging by the resulting registrations) from the more competitive markets like USA and Canada.

My problems in trying for low CPC on these have been that Facebook just stops delivering traffic. Period. You basically aren't meeting their bid and it just stops. I tried targeting it pretty tightly by interest, but Facebook just wouldn't give me the traffic. Its possible someone was outbidding me.

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