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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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)

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.

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 ;-)

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...

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