One of the first questions you should ask about an online venture is “How will I get quality traffic”. In other words how do you get visitors to your site in big enough quantities, and not only visitors but visitors who are or will be interested in what you have to sell?
One answer is paid advertising on the web, and it’s a great answer. It’s the best answer in fact!
Unlike trying to get organic traffic from search engines, or rely on free ‘viral’ traffic, you can exercise a lot of control over what happens. You can test a campaign for $50 and then choose to scale it up further or cut your losses.
Compare losing $50 to losing 20 hours trying to get your page to number 1 in Google by getting backlinks and writing articles only to find out the idea wasn’t good anyway. (Been there).
So having read a lot of good stuff about Facebook ads, I tried a few campaigns out. I decided to try CPA (cost per action) campaigns because they are usually well optimised to convert and you can tell quickly if the campaign is tanking or doing well. By contrast selling a $200 course as an affiliate may require a lot of spend before you know if it is converting.
At first my big hurdle was actually getting a campaign approved by Facebook. They have a lot of rules and if you make a mistake you are directed to a set of rules and you have to try and figure out what you did wrong. I had a lot of ‘trial and error’ and it can be frustrating. However I was determined no to give up.
The second hurdle was the price of click. Whatever or whoever I targeted I never got less than $1.50 estimate per click and often as much as $4. This is way to expensive for CPA infact way to expensive for most things.
From articles I read it seemed the trick was to bid low and slowly raise your bid. However I found one thing was for sure with a low bid: no displays of your ad! Another thing I tried was to pay per 1000 impressions. This can be as cheap as 10c and if you get 0.1% of people to click that is just 10c per click!
However despite testing many ad combinations, images and different offers, I never got anywhere near the giddy heights of 0.1% CTR. The best was 0.05% CTR but as soon as I tried to scale up the traffic it dropped to 0.01%, go figure!
I have a feeling that where your ad is displayed (1st, 2nd, 3rd) etc will affect the CTR but unlike Google ads it’s not clear where you will end up or where you did end up.
Overall I failed to make a profitable campaign. I have some ideas why and I may come back to Facebook ads as I think it could be an incredible source of traffic, especially with all the targeting options and the power of the Like button. However for now it is on the back-burner.
Lessons learned:
- I believe campaigns should fit into the Facebook ecosystem – my ads were just linking off somewhere but I reckon if the landing page is a fan page with a Like button and something that is popular then there will be more success.
- You need something very profitable and niche to target in my opinion. People do get cheap clicks but FB is reported to be getting more expensive all the time. So if you have to pay $1, $2 for a click I think you need good targeting and a good back-end. Direct linking CPA’s isn’t enough as often they only pay $2-$3.
- Making money online isn’t easy – but I already knew that
