Ask HN: Ads with small budget for personal project? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Ads with small budget for personal project?

80 pointskioleanu67 comments

I've been trying for months to bring more traffic to my personal project's website. I've tried multiple combinations for months, researched and paid people to look at the ads and suggest what I can do.

Here's the problem: I only have a small budget I can afford and that is 15€ per day, per platform.

1. With Facebook, they say they sent more than double the clicks Analytics tells me they sent and the clicks that do pass through have an almost 100% bounce rate with average time spent on page of 0 seconds. For example, they say they sent 300 clicks in a week, but I only see 120-130 in Analytics.

2. With the same ad, on Reddit Ads, I see in Analytics 90-95% of the clicks they said they sent and the bounce rate is about 82%, with more than 3 minutes average sessions.

With both platforms I run an ad and then a retargeting ad. Until now, this was the only strategy that had relative success.

All the people that consulted on the ads said that with 15€ per day, Facebook gives 0 results, which I already saw and I find disappointing. The only explanation I can find is that on Facebook I only get bot clicks.

Are there any other platforms that are more suitable for my budget?

View on HN

Assuming you're talking about Compass Letters: Right now, it's a B2C business. So you're plucking customers one by one. That's ineffective. What you'd like is to turn it into a B2B2C problem:

Take a step back and look at the bigger picture: You're marketing to parents who are educated, have likely travelled places themselves. They're reasonably well off to consider this a small expense. These are parents who are professionals. They likely work for big companies. Big companies with HR departments.

Instead of selling to the parents, sell to the "Head of HR" person in large companies. You find these people on LinkedIn. They, too, are likely parents. And the pitch becomes that it's a lovely gift to employees (for Xmas, for their b-day, as new joiners), at a highly attractive price point, which will keep on giving all year round. As a bonus, gift them personally a subscription for their own children. (Your product becomes the marketing. This is where it costs you.)

Only this time, for every person converted, you'll get hundreds, possibly thousands of sales.

Looking at the site, he could probably also target tourism boards, chambers of commerce or other entities that spend money on getting people to visit.

Where i work it is not head of HR that choose the xmas gifts. It is the girls in the reception in HQ office that makes those decisions.

Bounce rate just means that someone came to your site and did not interact with the analytics DB in any other way. A user can scroll up and down 50x, stay until 29 minutes and 59 seconds, leave, and it will be a bounce. Bounce rate is a terrible leading KPI to look at. It's easy to understand and a classic vanity metric that doesn't matter. Applying an old favorite of mine: you can't pay your rent with a good bounce rate. Time on site is the same.

To combat this, you can set up scroll tracking. There are some GTM templates out there. Every time someone scrolls to a percentage of the whole of a page (for instance, 25% of the page but you can set it for pixels too), you can push data to the server. This artificially reduces bounce rate (yay?) but it gives you a much better idea of if people are actually getting anywhere in your content. It's actionable to know how far people are willing to scroll down your page.

Facebook Ads, like many platforms, have terrible placements by default that get mis-clicks that drive lots of clicks in the Facebook UI. Lots of these people click the back button before they even get to your site so analytics does not fire. A good example is an in-app ad where a user gets a reward for watching your ad. They may accidentally thumb it. Turn off all placements except Feed for FB & IG. These are the most expensive but the most reliable and highest quality for a small budget.

Ads are ruthless in the early stages unless you have a truly unique product/service and can run Google Ads. If I had a unique offering ("world's only data center ____ solution" then I would start there.

If you're a me-too company or just offering services, I would evaluate ads vs other channels like sales.

>I would evaluate ads vs other channels like sales.

This is probably the best advice when it comes to this specific topic; however, there are some other options which I still suggest you play in (see below).

>Ads are ruthless in the early stages unless you have a truly unique product/service and can run Google Ads.

There are entire companies that exist solely to dominate search results for branded and non-branded search terms related to businesses that already have product in market. You're NOT going to compete with companies spending multiple millions of dollars a month in Paid Search.

What you can do, however, is work on dominating Organic Search results via SEO. While these same companies are competing with best-practices in SEO, they cannot win with investment alone. You too can follow the same best practices and potentially get the search engines to pay attention to you too. If you can land on the first page of results, you have a real shot.

> Bounce rate just means that someone came to your site and did not interact with the analytics DB in any other way.

Oh god how many times I've tried to explain this to people. High bounce rate can even be a sign of a really good landing page in that if you don't interact with the content in any other way that could mean you found all the information you were looking for and didn't have to navigate elsewhere digging for stuff. Of course, if you have a conversion / funnel you'll be measuring that as well, and then bounce rate becomes even more useless of a metric.

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is looking at Facebook Groups. The advertising can be weird because it is somewhat of a grey area, but most Facebook groups pages are run by companies or moderators who are looking for a little extra cash. They will add you to their group and let you post a certain amount of ads per day. You have to make the posts interesting and provide value to the group members, as more engagement will increase the reach of your post.

On a side project last summer, I was able to work with a company running education niche groups. To join 10 of their groups (total reach probably around 30k audience) was $500 per month billed on PayPal. Could make a post per day in all 10 groups, so 300 posts. The conversion rate was better than any other paid advertising we had tried and the targeting was much easier.

It’s easy to get started: find a few Facebook groups you might be interested in joining, go to about this group, add the admin as a friend/send a message request, and ask about advertising opportunities. Be sure to show them your project, and why you think it would be beneficial to their audience, that will help your case!

Also - have you thought about going to teachers with your product (assuming it’s compass letters from your post history), getting them on a free subscription, and hoping the kids go home and tell their parents they want to get the letters too?

> a company running education niche groups

This is very interesting. Could please you tell me the name of that company and provide their contacts?

My email is in profile in case you don't want to share publicly.

You're too focused on external factors outside of your control. Your landing page, frankly, has an offer that almost nobody will want. Your headline amounts to "let me send you snail mail," which is not compelling in any way. If I clicked on an ad to buy snail mail, it would probably be on accident. I'd quickly press the back button.

I'm not trying to be harsh here, but the reality is that very few people will buy, based on your offer, unless they already know and like you in some way.

In addition, many of the things you're offering are avaiable for free, online, in a digital format, or from bigger companies with large budgets, in magazine formats. It's not clear what sets you apart, or why it would be worth parting with my hard earned money.

You're asking people for their money -- but you're landing page copy needs a lot of work. That is the problem you're running into.

Before having a successful advertising campaign, you will have to spend a lot of time iterating and testing different offers, to see what works and what doesn't. That's the stage you're at right now.

I liked the homepage and the only reason I am not subscribing to the "Globetrotter prepaid 12 months" plan is that I don't have kids yet. This is such a good idea imo.

Unfortunately I think you will find a budget of 15€/day a little too low to see much traction quickly. Most advertising platforms have gone all in on ML in a way that until you have had a significant amount of traffic they can't really train their algorithms. I would consider a sorter sharper campaign to see what you can achieve.

From our experience you need to be spending 8-10x that per day to kick start a campaign on Facebook.

Additionally, depending on your projects market Facebook/Instagram results can vary very widely. Targeting is hard, you can obviously use Facebooks audience tools to try and target but from our experience these can be difficult to get right. Without a little more information about your project I can't really suggest anything else. This is where the ML targeting is essential but as I said that need significant traffic to work.

> Facebook ... say they sent 300 clicks in a week, but I only see 120-130 in Analytics

This is about right from our estimation, it's a fairly new occurrence and down to Apples tracking changes that came in with iOS 14.5. If your target market are likely to have a large proportion of iOS users the tracking of Facebook ads has gotten quite bad. We estimate that up to 60% of iOS clicks are not tracked by Facebook/Analytics, Facebook obviosly know someone clicked the ad, but after that the tracking can break very easily. This is particularly bad for conversion tracking.

We have also experienced big problems with tracking people who leave the Facebook in app browser and move to their main browser to continue. We have found popping up a message encouraging them to open in their main browser if they try to navigate away from the landing page works well. It ensures that any Facebook/Analytics url args are still present in the URL when they move browser, setting a new tracking cookie based on them.

When we introduced this before Christmas we saw a massive increase in general trackability with Facebook.

> Are there any other platforms that are more suitable for my budget?

I would consider Google search result ads, it potentially allows you to target people who are already looking for something like what you are doing. It tends to have a significantly higher conversion rate than display advertising. Particularly at your daily budget it would be easer to play with, although at 15€/day you will only be getting 10-20ish (ballpark) clicks per day. If you have a conversion rate of say 2.5% (again about ballpark) then that's about 1 conversion every two-four days.

I started a business recently and started advertising with Google Ads. No luck with 10€/day for two months despite iterating on keywords, ads, and landing pages a few times. Had to stop the campaigns to avoid wasting money.

What I started doing next is laser focused prospecting and reaching out to them directly. That has been more successful, although feels sleazy and from time to time people get pretty mad about the outreach.

So try to figure out who benefits the most from your solution, and how you can find them. Then tailor your sales material for them, find them and reach out to them.

Prospecting will help you make better ads as well if you want to continue with them.

Sounds like a lot of work? It is! Good luck with your project!!

I had the same experience 6 years ago, most of the traffic from ads is indeed fake, so I stopped pouring money into ads, especially the social media ones: https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/4smisl/facebook_...

Two things come to my mind.

1 - What is the ROI on the Reddit ads? Maybe it's worth spending $30/day on Reddit rather than splitting between that and a platform with -100% ROI. You need to reach a certain threshold of traffic before you can reliable start testing the ad copy, the offer, funnel, etc.

2 - Where are you sending the ad clicks? If you're just sending them to your website, you might as well just be burning the money to keep warm. Make sure you have a single-purpose landing page where the only goal is to get them to sign up, buy, whatever your goal is. No header; no menu; everything on one fast-loading, minimal-to-no-JS page. You're paying for the traffic, you only care if they convert or not. Convert in this sense might be paying for something, or more likely signing up for an email list or "more information."

How about sponsoring a podcast or newsletter in your niche? Worth a try since PPC isn't treating you well.

Exactly this, you get access to a dedicated target audience at a really competitive price point. I think a lot of small podcasts/newsletters will happily accept 100 euros for a small slice in their media. Add some artificial urgency, such as "sign up now with code X you get a Y% discount". FOMO is powerful.

Depending on the nature of the product it might be worth getting somebody to do an (honest) paid review of it. It both gives you an impression of how somebody is interacting with your product and gives you exposure to their audience.

Either this or rethink your packaging entirely. If it's pay to play, consider having a free tier. Make sure you are only charging your proper rates to those fully invested in your product.

Great idea. Thank you!

There have been so many threads about Fb sending bot traffic, was just reading this thread on indiehackers yest(1).

The question is who is sending this bot traffic? Fb itself? It's a bit doubtful since all their shenanigans about tracking people and targeting is to improve conversions for their advertisers so they spend more. Also if a software like Darwin can detect and flag bot traffic how come FB can't? What am i missing here?

(1) https://www.indiehackers.com/post/facebook-ads-is-it-all-bot...

I am working in online marketing. I don't know the project, but in most cases you should start with Google Ads (search ads) to get new users and also setup a newsletter to keep them coming back. If you can handle social media also add this to the mix and try to get your users to follow you there. Of course this is a very simplified advice, but I am sure this direction will get you better results than FB or reddit ads.

Shameless plug.. Does sponsoring my low traffic indie website[0] make sense to you? Audience is mostly fellow HNer's - I only showed it here. Even if doesn't work out the investment is tiny.

[0] https://www.slowernews.com/sponsor

Interesting. I would consider sponsoring for my little side project, a couple of new customers could cover the cost. But it would be nice to clarify:

- What is the current price. I can see you have an ad so presumably it is >30.

- Do I pay quarterly? I think that is implied but it isn't quite clear.

> What is the current price. I can see you have an ad so presumably it is >30.

It's still 30€ (per quarter) once I don't have a real sponsor. The actual affiliate link is mine.

> Do I pay quarterly? I think that is implied but it isn't quite clear.

Yes. It only makes sense to allow quarterly ads. The money involved is tiny and it fits the idea of the site.

Thanks for pointing this things, I already updated some tidbits there.

Am I crazy to think there should be a clear way to get to the homepage from that page? I like the idea (maybe?) but do I really need to edit the URL to navigate your site :-)

If you click the "+" button you'll get links to all sections of the main page. Anyway I just realized it is not obvious.

I love this. I thought about creating a site (essentially a book tracker with upcoming release dates for series or new books; never created it, please ping me if you do, I’d love such a site) and something like this was how I envisioned it paying for itself.

> but I only see 120-130 in Analytics

Set a specific target URL parameter and check your logs. Depending on your topic, you may see anywhere between 0% and 80% of ad/tracking blockers.

I have that! I completely forgot that I can check the server logs. Thank you for the tip!

What is the type of product?

I had an app that would be fun for college students and parties. I printed out some posters with QR codes and placed them around a local campus. One was just a red solo cup with the QR under it - that got the most visits. The app wasn't successful due to marketing and user friendliness/flashiness.

Basically, if your product has a user base that would frequent a physical space, it could be an option to go low-tech with posters/flyers.

Is your project aimed at people who would typically use an ad blocker? If so, then maybe the only people clicking through are people like my dad who would click every link on a page.

If your project is what I think it is (anonymous email), then ads based on user surveillance, like Google and Reddit, probably aren't going to work. Maybe try sponsoring a talk at a security conference or get a billboard on the main commute lines of a tech-heavy neighborhood.

Not necessarily, it's aimed at parents as the main target audience. Thank you for the tip with the security conference!

Quick-Tip v2: Please rethink the position of your discount and cookie-banner for the german page, it covers the links in your footer. Maybe put a bigger bottom-margin on the <body> that disappears on closing the banners. I shit you not, the law and lawyers are picky about that:

"...Mistakes can also occur in the placement of the "cookie banner": If the cookie banner e.g. covers the link to the imprint, the requirements of the Telemedia Act are not met. According to this, website operators must be identifiable for users. This is not the case if the user cannot reach the imprint directly and constantly, which would be the case with an overlaying cookie banner."

https://www.wolter-musselmann.de/inside/themen/detailansicht...

Depends on your target audience, but if it's techies, they may not even be seeing any of your ads because of the ad blockers. And those that don't use ad blockers aren't likely to click on G and FB ads (on reddit - it depends on the ad). So what you do see if some random people seeping through, which would explain the bounce rate.

Good point, I don't see many adverts but I do see reddit ones and occasionally click them by accident.

If I may be so bold, I do not think Compass Letters is the sort of service one promotes with advertising. Instead, the $15k you mention ($5k/yr on 3 platforms) would be FAR better spent on other marketing activities. Media coverage, co-marketing deals, contests, direct mail to day care centers, edutainment deals with schools, etc., etc. If you have a difficult time even imagining alternative marketing initiatives, there are many books that cover this sort of thing. Or ask the advice of someone in PR/marketing consulting.

Generally speaking, advertising is what you do when you have lots of money and not a lot of time or ideas (relative to the returns you're seeking). It's a saturation bombing of marketing tools -- you need to think like a guerilla. IMO, your product is unique enough that it could generate a reasonable amount of traditional press and social media coverage if played right.

It really depends on what you are selling and who your target audience is.

If you are selling curtains or soft furnishings your target audience is women and Pinterest is your best channel.

If you are selling dog food and beds your audience is general public with an interest in dogs, facebook is the best channel for general public, find a dog related group or buy and sell group make a post and then pay to promote it.

If you are selling something more business focused like an accounting service then Linkedin is best.

If you are selling something technical like a developer tool then reddit or stackexchange.

My point is that your advertising channel is not determined primary by budget but rather by your target audience and your target audience is determined by your product or service.

Costco.

Costco Travel is a bigger part of their biz than many folks know...and they have the demographics to support this price point. The letters are charming and their customers have Amazon money with better sensibilities. And alot of them are also small biz owners...not just highly paid employees.

Have you considered paid search? Unlike display ads, users are actively seeking something in the realm of your offering and hopefully more likely to engage with greater conviction. The cost effectiveness will of course depend on the competitiveness of your search terms.

+1 I think people with small budget need to spend it on SEO which in my opinion would generate more traction that ads.

I think @merek meant something like Google Ads (formerly Adwords) when they were talking about paid search. These are adverts that appear alongside Google results when you don't have an ad-blocker installed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ads

They are probably more effective than Facebook because they are much more targeted. It does depend on your audience though, I don't know of anybody reasonably technical who doesn't have an ad-blocker installed so maybe not so useful for targeting those people.

I also found for my targeted keywords I had indirect competitors who could afford to outbid me because they were selling much higher value products. They could afford a much higher cost of acquisition because they were expecting a $10,000+ sale whereas my average was $250. Some of my peers also found competitors stuffed with VC money. They were willing to lose money on each transaction in the hope of making it up later.

Finally Google is a bit scammy when it comes to the whole Adwords control panel. They will introduce new features and select the option which enriches them rather than you. In particular be wary of broad match on keywords. Running a successful campaign requires a reasonable amount of diligence on your part.

https://tinyads.io/

I tried to set it up but after about 24h then my site has received 0 impressions/clicks.

In my experience Adwords > FB Ads > Reddit

FB ads have improved and are great for some products but generally Adwords is still the performance king. If you've only done FB, consider Adwords.

Reddit is really only good for free promotion. While Im sure it exists, I've need seen positive ROI on paid on the handful of campaigns Ive run there. It can be great for organic type activities: AMA, viral or hail corporate type activity.

Question: How far are you off your target for 'success'? If your way off you need to totally rethink your approach most likely. If your close but not good enough you probably need to refine and get better targeting and user flow.

Focus on SEO. Get a blog going if you haven't already, and target keywords that are ranking well for your competitors. I'm not an SEO expert but at this very low budget you're more likely to get conversions from people who find you organically. Even if they click on an ad, they don't know who you are. If you let them discover you naturally their interest will be piquéd.

In other words, generate some clout naturally. When you've got some customers, some reviews on relevant platforms, and things start picking up naturally, keep nurturing that. Add ads as another means of advertising, not your only means.

> With Facebook, they say they sent more than double the clicks Analytics tells me they sent

This is largely Apple's tracking changes. About 60% of the market is iOS.

In today's world with privacy changes and regulations, you're pretty much limited to econometric time series modeling or A/B testing to understand cross platform marketing drivers reliably. That doesn't really work on 15 dollars a day

With that kind of a budget, it's going to be more worthwhile looking at who is your prime prospect, what is the value you're adding to them and the choice of platform and message follows that.

There's no indication of what it is unfortunately in your post.

even if you account of 60% being iOS, the math doesn't work out. Where is the other 40% ?

Op said they tracked 50% or so no? FB says 2X, Op was able to attribute X to Fb

Even if not Facebook tries very hard to make their ads hard to block whereas a generic Google Analytics will be blocked by anyone with an ad+tracker blocker. This could result in a big difference.

Perhaps consider some sort of a media buy? It's absolute finger in the air without knowing what you do, but assuming your site is in a niche with bloggers/other non-product related sites, ask some if you can put a banner up for a week to test. You're spending 105 a week now, you'd be surprised at how little some hobbyists will take (especially if they're seeing $x a day AdSense income).

With that kind of money you are not likely to be able to move the needle much doing conventional ads. You need to do some out of the box thinking. Ads on smaller more targeted sides, a youtube channel/Social media work, straight up writing mails to potential customers (heck you can hire someone 1 hour to stand in front of your potential customers buildings with a sign and get better results)

Ok with such a budget - you can get 15 clicks, you won't have enough data to support your hypothesis.

Paid advertising should only work when you already have data on your LTV, payback and cohorts.

You can literally get hundreds of thousands of impressions by looking at your audience, finding similar attributes and then posting to niche: - Reddits - Facebook groups - Telegram communities etc.

Best thing is, its actually free.

Start your own FB GROUP and invite users to that and offer them an amazon credit if they refer a paying customer. Forget paid ads. Build your brand equity organically. You simply cannot SPEND your way up, your too small. And while your at it start a subreddit for your product / service and start posting there too and talk to people and tell them to join. Good Lucky!

It depends hugely on your market. If there's anything you can guess about your target market (they're wealthier than average, they are mostly coastal, they like fishing, they're under 18) then you can push fewer ads by going directly at your segment. And maybe sponsor a site or creator who already has that market segment in their pocket.

Wait for Digital Services Act: https://ec.europa.eu/info/digital-services-act-ensuring-safe...

Quick-Tip: By german law, the link to your Data protection & Privacy policy needs to be visible and reachable in an unrestricted way. So please put the Datenschutzerklärung in the footer, before some lawyer sends you "The PayUs Letters".

What is your ad and retargeting ad strategy? What sort of landing pages are you using and how are you retargeting?

I am retargeting users that have visited the page, based on the FB respectively Reddit pixels. It is the exact same add, but I change the copy slightly to say "Use the code X for 10% discount".

This is the landing page: https://thecompassletters.com/read-travel-letters/

Here’s my first impression in case it’s useful.

If this product is for entertainment, then I need more proof that I will be entertained. It’s very difficult to convince me to buy this when I have access to the internet, books, and lots of video streaming services for the same purpose.

If this product is educational in nature, then I can see how you might convince parents to buy it for their kids so that their kids can learn about cultures around the world. Also, kids are gonna be more excited about getting physical mail than adults (I suspect). If this were my project, I would probably pivot to selling to parents (maybe especially home-schooling parents). You might be able to sell to schools too (private schools?).

Good luck! Entrepreneurship is so hard.

Professional copywriter + media buyer here. (also a software engineer)

The Tldr; here is that your budget is too low to do anything meaningful on FB.

In the simplest terms, FB traffic is mostly garbage unless you're optimizing for purchases, and those clicks are easily gonna be in the $.5-$1 range these days. It's gotten expensive. If you're getting that many clicks for ~$15, I can tell you're running a Traffic objective and that's just gonna be garbage regardless. l

That said, you're on the right track with the retargeting, but even then, you're not running enough in the first place for retargeting to work. It takes a relatively larger data set.

I wouldn't bother running FB traffic if I can't spend at least $50/day, maybe $100/day.

I realize that most people cannot just throw that kind of money into the pit though.

So, to make this work you need a well planned and executed funnel, product, etc. which is beyond the scope of this discussion, but that's kind of the reality:

Running ads on any platform for $15/day in 2022, is basically worthless. It's sort of a lame reality, but it is what it is really. If you're interested in diving deep into this, I would be happy to help and could point you towards some good resources for learning though.

Also, one last thing:

FB analytics is basically un-trustable garbage and it's know that the data is going to be worthless. All serious media-buyers (people who run ads) use third party tracking software.

>If you're interested in diving deep into this, I would be happy to help and could point you towards some good resources for learning though.

I'll bite. I'm very interested.

>All serious media-buyers (people who run ads) use third party tracking software.

Out of interest, what services are worth looking into, please?

I have a client who swears by Hyros (though I suspect she's being sold snake oil by her business partner slash agency manager, who takes a fat commission off her monthly Hyros subscription spend).

Why don’t you spend more on Reddit until you stop seeing results?

I thought OP has a maximum budget?

It's a good idea to increase the budget and bid on Reddit, since I saw more results there - also 2 conversions (as opposed to 0 from FB). I will try it. Thank you!

Sanity on HN? Ads? Facebook? ROI? Click Rate? Targeting Ads? It just shows there are a silent group of people who do appreciate Ads. Even though it may not be perfect.

Why does everything have to be monetized? You know people used to do hobby stuff for free right?

OP did not say this was a hobby project. They might be trying to start a business. I think we should read "personal" as "not belonging to their employer".

because people who are providing value to others want to have a way to extract value as well. It's the reason why money was invented

More generally, it's better to have the option and not use it than not have the option at all.

I am selling physical products that cost (quite a lot of) money to create and send. I need to sell them otherwise, I can't sustain the project

Reply on news.ycombinator.com