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Comment by napoleoncomplex | Hacker News Reader

Like others have said, it really depends on what you're selling and who you're targetting.

Our example (country specific mobile app for doctors), spent 100 € on AdWords, end result was literally 0 app installs, 0 sign-ups, 0 everything. Medical keywords are expensive, no chance of sending them directly to the App Store/Play Store (that we saw at least), and no other useful targetting.

Here come Facebook mobile install ads. 40 € spent so far, 500+ app installs, 200+ sign-ups, great retention. We can roughly target medical professionals, take them directly to the app stores, and the clicks are cheap as hell.

I have no doubt that AdWords work much better in other cases, and that FB can be useless, but it's not black and white, you need to know which tool fits the purpose.

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Are you really getting $0.10 installs via Facebook Mobile ads? If so you're performing better than any FB ad account I've seen in the last 6 months (and I've seen a lot). Even gaming doesn't perform close to this well.

If this is actually true you should be doing affiliate installs which routinely pay out $1 with no (or high) caps. You could literally make tens of thousands of dollars daily.

Where can you find affiliate arbitragers like this? Totally get that he/she should be doing this, but how do you find the people doing this effectively? I'm all for paying when someone has figured this out, because the installs I get often make me want to give up trying. Thanks!

Search mobile CPA networks.

The installs you get from mobile affiliate are usually shit in terms of performance fwiw. The install flows are things like ads that say [get the app now] then link directly to a random app in the app store, so there is very little intent.

This may also be a product of scale. Cost per install is likely to change vastly as you increase spend from 40 to 40k.

I got something similar (about $0.11 per click, $0.18 per install) on my Android game:

http://bigosaur.com/blog/28-facebook-ads-android-players

You need to use the targeting options, otherwise you're wasting money.

I think it is due to multiple factors, but mainly the small, targeted scale of the audience, the usefulness of the product to that audience, and our first mover advantage.

For example, with less than 50 €, the ad has already been seen by around 15 % of the total audience. No matter how much we throw in, it's going to be going slower and slower from now on. But it is enough for us to get seeded among a few hundred medical professionals, and then rely on word of mouth to carry us forward.

Edit: It's also a free app, just to make that clear.

"I think it is due to multiple factors, but mainly the small, targeted scale of the audience,"

This is just good marketing advice for smaller businesses. Find as specific a niche as possible and market to that. Maybe the parent's product serves a very general audience which may make it harder to market.

Not necessarily. Prices increase pretty significantly with a smaller target audience. (It definitely depends on the vertical and product). For example, it's generally slightly more cost effective for a sushi restaurant in a small city to target the city than target people who "like" sushi on Facebook in that city.

I don't know if you're doing it already, but in the interest targeting you can include professions too and it will target people who have it set to their "work" on FB; plus adding hospitals to workplace targeting you can quickly close the gap

And as another handy tool, you can use the FB ads api without authentication to perform certain types of search: http://graph.facebook.com/search?type=adworkplace&q=hospital... and build your targeting criteria

Hope it helps :)

Thanks for the tip! Were professions added recently? "Doctor of Medicine" wasn't on the list at the time we put up the ads a month ago.

For workplace targetting, it looks like none of the hospitals in our current markets (Balkans) are in the system, so it's not as useful. We had a similar problem when trying to target people with "Medical School" as education and got something like 10 people total, seems education as an attribute is counted only for US-based users.

You've been able to target professions as interests for a very long time, but it wasn't obvious in the UI, glad it helped :)

And yeah, I imagine some countries will be under-represented, sadly

Yes, FB added the ability to target job titles in February this year: http://adage.com/article/btob/facebook-takes-shot-linkedin-j...

It's actually been there since the very beginning, but it wasn't publicised too much.

I totally agree, "it depends". Facebook advertising can be much more useful than the OP and many others are suggesting. One tiny little thing that 99% of people are completely overlooking:

-Page owners have the ability to restrict access by country.

This means it's literally just a couple clicks, and you can completely disable the "click-farm" countries from seeing your page (+ advertisements).

http://sendgrowth.com/blog/simple-defense-facebook-click-far... (short post about it, shameless plug) http://i.imgur.com/snkv77Q.png (screenshot of facebook settings page)

In the test that this guy did for himself, restricting by country didn't help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=oV...

App install advertising is totally different from CPC.

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