Facebook Ads: The Cheapest Traffic You'll Ever Buy | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Ads: The Cheapest Traffic You'll Ever Buy

blog.imranghory.org

183 pointsig157 comments

Edit: the link that one of the commenters provided is a lot more informative (if you came here lookinf for a "how")

http://www.dipoll.com/blog/2010/11/six-steps-to-run-cheap-an...

OP, if you're reading this, how did you get such low CPC rates on facebook?

No offense, but this post just sortof sounds like bragging. What were you targeting? What were you bids? What did your ad actually look like? What sort of picture did you use (facebook ads require a picture, last I checked).

Etc. etc.

This is really interesting to me, because I've tried facebook ads before and done miserably with them. I was planning on doing some more reddit self-serve advertising this week, but if you can get traffic from facebook for as cheap as you're claiming, I would definitely give that a try instead.

This would be a really great post if you could share some of the research you did.

The other site is interesting as they're using a somewhat unorthodox strategy, generally most people who do FB optimizations buy CPM rather than CPC as FB charge a premium for CPC adverts.

I'm guessing the reason they're getting cheap traffic is that their targeting countries where very few people advertise so there's almost no competition for traffic. It's an approach I hadn't really considered.

"FB charge a premium for CPC"? what do you mean?

You can buy FB ads either on a CPM or a CPC basis.

If you buy CPC ads, FB shows your ads to users who are more likely to click on ads, but you'll pay a lot for this service.

CPM prices are much cheaper. From my experience if you've got a CTR of over 0.025% (1 in 4000 views) then paying CPM is cheaper than CPC. And you should be able to get a CTR over that for most things.

General opinion among the FB ads community seems to be that paying CPC is a suckers games, FB are just using CPC pricing to exploit unsophisticated ad buyers.

Thanks for posting that link, definitely much more informative than the original post. I'm not sure if it was quite as shocking to everyone else but I had previously written off facebook ads. I'll definitely be giving this a try.

And great timing too, I posted a question that this answers about an hour ago. ("How do I improve marketing without being a domain expert?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2408842)

Read again the data I shared here: http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2011/04/01/sell-your-google-sto...

Facebook definitely works for me, despite the fact that my target audience is not particularly fan of Facebook (just like HN ;-)

I'm not sure if it was quite as shocking to everyone else

That's definitely what I heard from a lot of people when I gave a talk at ProductCamp on this topic. Hence the blog post.

Definitely going to write an article on this topic, but image and keyword targeting are the two big ones. But a lot of it is just about knowing what to A/B test and the mistakes to avoid.

The best guide I've seen for optimizing online is the Shoemoney guide:

http://www.shoemoney.com/facebook-advertising-soup-to-nuts-g...

Why didn't you wait to submit this until you actually had something to show, then? Could you even give a couple of tips other than "be good at targeting"?

Sorry, I'm not trying to be snarky, maybe I haven't had enough coffee today or something.

It's ok, I understand the frustration as I too am someone that has struggled with this and wished OP would have included said details.

Looking forward to his detailed write-up.

It's a pretty complex topic, so I'm still trying to figure out how to write it up coherently.

The shoemoney guide I linked is a decent intro to the topic.

The best one-liner advice I can give is A/B test a lot of images.

Also think about what keywords align with what you're trying to sell (obviously I can't really give very good generic advice on picking keywords!)

How long (time period) do you run your A/B tests?

I don't normally have a set period of time in mind, I just do it until it has enough views/clicks for the difference to look statistically significant.

I probably should be doing actual statistical significance testing, but I'm lazy, so just do it intuitively.

Should have at least put a picture of the ad that preforms well.

I'll be honest. The ad that performs best is a little cheesy, so I'm a little embarrassed to post it here where people actually know me :P

The image I used was a shrunken down version of this comic:

http://theoryofgeek.org/post/4050407389/the-optimal-brownie-...

It did 50% better than this one:

http://theoryofgeek.org/post/4291096322/date-date-revolution

It did 100% better than this one:

http://theoryofgeek.org/post/4205909563/the-social-networkin...

And about 200% better than when I used the profile pic image that I use on the Facebook page (from what I've heard on the grapevine company logos while great for branding tend to have very low CTRs):

http://www.facebook.com/theoryofgeek

(these datapoints aren't in the image I show on my blog; I tested them after I wrote most of that article and took that snapshot)

I should also point out that in CoderStack's ad campaigns cartoon images performed worse of all the images I tested, for CoderStack the best performing images were photographs of people. So there's no "one-size-fits-all" solution.

Cool, I guess one aspect of your best one here would be that it's more interesting the the equally easy to read logo. The other 2 cartoon images are probably hard to get at a glance at the small size you see the ad images at.

It's interesting because the limited campaign I have dealt with before used a logo and tagline type display, probably not the best.

None of them are readable at that size, it's about the general look. I don't know if these links are permalinks or not but here's the images at Facebook Ad size:

http://creative.ak.fbcdn.net/v41818/flyers/94/8/130096468117... http://creative.ak.fbcdn.net/v41818/flyers/79/27/13017869721... http://creative.ak.fbcdn.net/v41818/flyers/37/60/13017863821... http://creative.ak.fbcdn.net/v41818/flyers/50/27/13009629761...

My Facebook ads experience in a nutshell: mega-targeted towards US women interested in elementary education & etc, used a seasonally appropriate image and tagline, spent $140, got 275 clicks (~$0.46), four free trial signups (pick email and password), and (unsurprisingly) no sales. $140 of AdWords would typically get about 2.5k clicks and $300+ of sales.

This was a year ago. Every couple of months I wonder "Hmm, should I take another whack at FB?" and then I decide to do something useful with my money instead, like buying Frontierville dresses.

I feel silly asking you of all people this, but did you A/B test the targeting and images used or were you picking them based upon what worked elsewhere ?

If you want to take another shot as trying out Facebook and want to have someone look over your campaign, feel free to drop me an email.

That is a perfectly reasonable question. I didn't do any testing -- it was an experimental campaign and totally flamed out. If it had been anywhere in the general ballpark of feasible, I would happily have started iterating, but $35 CPA to the free trial of a thirty dollar product did not strike me as something which was amenable to iterate-quickly-to-victory.

For both the Theory of Geek and CoderStack ad campaigns going from initial ad to an optimized ad dropped eCPC by two orders of magnitude. Optimization has a huge impact on Facebook Ads.

Although if you're paying $0.05/click for traffic on Google there's probably less upside for you then someone who's paying $0.50/click on Google.

I second that. Just changing the image will often swing CTRs wildly. One of the great things about FB ads is that you can put an image (unlike google text ads) and the audience responds very well to images.

Have you ever considered setting up an affiliate program and letting other people risk their own ad spend? Also gives the teaching blogs incentive to promote it to their readers/email lists.

Ditto with $50.00 blown for squat. Fairly well targeted I thought.

It wasn't just that the clicks were expensive (also around ~$.45, interestingly). Our site is free to use, with no log in, and we have at most a 20% bounce rate on any one day using adwords. The facebook users had a 77% bounce rate, and those that didn't bounce stayed around for almost no time, clicking on an average of 1.5 pages as against 7.7 for our site average. They also typed in really lousy queries, if they didn't just press 'search'.

The Facebook Ads discussion is one which I believe will last a great deal amongst us. Is it really working? Why isn't it working for me? Why would anybody try to trick me, since the money I pay go to Facebook and not that person? These are most of the question I hear most every day.

I believe we firstly need to settle something out - and the article did that right from the title - you don't go on Facebook to sell, you go there to discuss, receive feedback, critics and nice words, you go there to create a community.

This being said, next thing to do is to establish what exactly you want to do there. Raise awareness, drive traffic, improve your communication skills, increase your community and so on.

Based on this analysis you can then determine if the money you invested were in vain or not.

If you go back in your comments history far enough to see this:

I would seriously love to hear how you're getting such cheap CPC on google adwords...

There is a lot of click fraud in Facebook ads. Have you ever checked your analytics logs to verify you are getting what you are paying for? In my case, around 40% of clicks I paid for never made it over. I emailed facebook ad support 6 times and the only response I ever received was from an auto responder. I'd never use their service again.

I've not seen any sign of fraud, FB data matches up with my own analytics.

How are you doing analytics tracking ? - if you're using GA or something similar then it could well be that the GA code isn't loading before the user bounces. If you check your webserver logs that should give you an indication if that's the case.

Yes, I used GA & getclicky and the results were almost identical. The landing page I was using was extremely lightweight and loaded in less than a second in most cases. I'd be really surprised if people could bounce before it loaded.

By the way, I'm not the only one reporting this issue: http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=facebook+...

I guess it depends on what your selling in the case of my comic click fraud doesn't make sense, and for my job board the majority of my competitors buying ads are major job boards.

If you're working in a more "black hat" corner of the ecommerce world like affiliate links, it's certainly possible that click fraud occurs, I just haven't seen it occurring.

Have you checked the analytics reports that Facebook generate to see if it is the same users clicking the advert over-and-over again ?

Once you take into account that Facebook traffic tends to start out at ~$1 a click and the fact that the people clicking it are just browsing(instead of searching like they do on Google)...you'll realize that Facebook traffic is the most expensive traffic you can buy.

Most people who make money off craigslist are the affiliate spammers who get paid something like $3 for every email submission form they get.

just noticed that I said craigslist...I was talking about Facebook

We also got better results from Facebook Ads than from AdSense. Something that we found is that we got better results if we changed the image on the Ad periodically and if we stopped for a while our campaigns.

We track the user by source, so we can check if the FB users are more or less active than users from other Ad networks or from users that come from organic search, and so far we have not observed a significant bias.

We are paying a few cents for each user registration (not click). No other Ad network comes close to these numbers for our site. Our budget is of some (single digit) thousands dollars per month, and we have been running these Ads for a few months.

> We are paying a few cents for each user registration (not click).

How do you do that? I thought Facebook Ads only offers CPC (pay per click) and CPM (per thousand impressions)?

We use CPM. When the user registers we store their source (facebook Ad, AdSense, organic, etc.), and we derive how much are we paying for each user, as I said, a few cents for each user registration.

I recently tried BuySellAds in an attempt to target ads a specific interest group (technology websites). The result has been horrible. CTRs are like 0.001%. I'm getting about 30-50 clicks a day and with the same funds on AdSense I'd be getting nearly a thousand clicks a day. It's too bad i sunk so much into the experiment.

I hadn't looked at BuySellAds before, but looking at it now, I wouldn't buy ads on any network that didn't let me filter by geography.

It's trivial for an ad network to implement geographic filtering, ads are worth a lots less outside the handful of major economies, generally speaking if an ad network doesn't do geotargeting it implies the ad network is trying to sell you low value international traffic at US traffic prices.

it actually looks like your ad is doing decent - despite the low click through rate. if you look at the price of the 1 ad you purchased & average out what it's costing you per click it's not bad at all. I'd be surprised if you were able to get the same results from AdSense... & I'm happy to dig into this more with you and also help you find other sites in the network that would be a good fit for your product (todd@buysellads.com).

I've gotten clicks that cost about .01. The whole idea is just to super target. For instance, target users who are interested in runescape, use a runescape image, use a ad text along the lines of "Love Runescape?" and some creative ad text.

Then you want to split them all up into different ads for different demographics.

My problem with facebook is CTR's will drop a lot over time... so you constantly need to keep submitting fresh ads.

CTRs will definitely drop over time if you're super-targeting, it's a trade-off you need to make.

FB don't offer frequency capping, so if your target demographic only has 5000 members then if you're showing 10,0000 ads/day then pretty soon everyone in that demographic will have seen your ad and the CTR will drop. FB has some decent reporting though for measuring ad saturation among your demographic.

What's the policy (and the actual enforcement) on using copyrightten content as your picture? I'm not surprised Twilight imagery converts better than a company logo, but it seems a little sketchy.

In my opinion and experience Facebook ads can work well only if you advertise your fan page. Get people like it (obviously the fan page needs to be interesting for this), then from time to time post stuff that advertises your startup.

It's more work, but you can market to every fan many times instead of hoping she will buy from you or give you her email address from the single visit the ad would bring to your site.

Cheapest CPC, maybe. But usually very low conversion rates on FB.

For Theory Of Geek most of my organic traffic is driven from social sites like Twitter and Reddit, Facebook visitors are actually much more engaged (average Reddit visitor views about 1.2 pages, average Facebook visitor 4.5 pages).

For CoderStack engagement (developers applying for jobs) roughly matches that of long-tail organic search traffic.

There is a huge difference between organic traffic and paid. The former has a huge selection bias, by definition, for those visitors that are interested in what you have to offer.

Ever tried doing a CPC campaign on Facebook for any of those sites? I'd bet that the usage metrics would come out way differently.

That data is for advertising on Facebook

Interesting... Misread your comment then. I'm working in e-Commerce in Europe, and I see opposite results.

Are your ads clear about what you're selling?

The biggest problem with FB ads of course, is having a product that is sale-able to the facebook audience. I.e. entertainment/interest products, not needs-based products

I don't buy that limitation. A tax accountant could properly make good money around tax time with the right targeting.

The key is not to target too broad a group.

I'd still say that's targeted based on "interest." Everyone needs tax work around tax time. It's much harder to target say "people who need a new furnace."

|The key is not to target too broad a group. <-- That's the key in almost all direct marketing.

There's quite a few affiliate marketers successfully using it for selling local services (dentists, leads for car salesrooms, etc.)

It'd be interesting in seeing the quality of those leads for final businesses.

For most project it is not about clicks but about conversion and that is greatly depends from the product that you are selling. Facebook is more "fun" than "money spending" community. Google unrelated CPC keywords give 8X fold better conversion than Facebook targeted ads from each click for me. Would be more useful to have specific information on your numbers beside clicks.

See my comments elsewhere in this discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2409001

I'm not directly selling for either of my campaigns (although FB has incidentally netted me a few sales for my job board; that's incidental rather than intentional), so you could be right about people being hesitant to spend money.

Although for CoderStack I do get plenty of people applying for jobs after clicking on an ad, so it's not all fun.

I think a lot of it is about being careful about how you're tuning your ads, it's easy to make an ad that people will click on that misleads the clicker as to what your website will contain.

But if you start with an ad that's very specific about what you're delivering and then tweak the other aspects (image, demographic targeting) then you can probably get a healthy conversion rate.

(all my ads are clear about what you'll get if you click through)

The important thing every single article on HN always misses out is that spending 100, 200 or even 5000$ is almost never a large enough pool to deduce anything about a ad network. Put through a hundred million paid impressions and then tell me what does and doesnt work.

I'll be the first to admit that the techniques that work for me may well not work for someone running a million dollar ad campaign.

For most startups and SMEs (i.e the HN audience broadly speaking) that doesn't matter, most of us are running ad budgets in the thousands rather than millions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com