Watch the video above to see the video version of this blog post.

Today in this blog post, I am going to show you Part 2 of my 4 Part series where I show you my first Facebook ads campaign for list building. What I did right and what I did wrong.  If you did not read part 1 of the case study you can read it here.

To review, my goal is to get an email subscriber for $1 or less. In Part 1 I showed you how I selected my audiences. They were the Fan pages of Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn and Social Media Examiner. In this blog post, I will show you how I started to optimize my campaign to lower my cost per subscriber. After my first week, my ads looked like this:

So just to recap from last week. I got my campaign started up toward the end of the week. I spent $24 and got ten clicks – $2.40 per click. I didn’t get any lead conversions. Nobody signed up. I basically blew $24 and had nothing to show for it. I needed to get my cost per click down to about $0.30 ($2.50 per click just was not going to cut it). At a 33% subscription rate I figure I got a shot of at least getting a new email subscriber for a buck. The math looks like this:

$.33 per click X 3 clicks = $1.03 per subscriber

3 clicks at $0.33 per click comes out to $1.03 per email subscriber. That’s pretty much where I want to be. So for week 2 here is what I did to start optimizing my campaigns.

First, I took my 2 audiences and broke them into different groups by age, income, and geography. For geography I compared the US only vs. Canada, UK, and Australia. Then I checked those each morning to see which ones would give me the lowest cost per click. I would turn off the more expensive one and try to improve it to beat the cheaper one. I think you get the idea. Here are the results from Week 2:

So you can see I started creating different ad sets based on different incomes and geography. I was looking at the website clicks. I sorted them and you can see my highest cost per click was with Smart Passive Income all ages – $2.38 per click. But it goes all the way down to a $1.12 when I look at Smart Passive Income with the international (non US) audience. When we look at this you still see the amount of $1.97 a click and you can see $10.35 per new subscriber. That’s not good. It’s ten times more than what I want to pay for an email subscriber. Paying a $1.12 to $2.38 per click is just way too expensive.

I added a conversion pixel to my optin thank you page and now Facebook is at least tracking my conversions.

Tip: Set up a conversion pixel right away in your website, you will see why later in a later blog post.

So to recap no matter how I changed up my audiences, it didn’t get my cost per click low enough for all this to work but it did cut my cost per click in half.

Optimizing your campaign takes a lot less time than setting it up. Expect to spend five or ten minutes a day checking and optimizing your campaign.

I am still nowhere close to my goal. I’m starting to think that Facebook just won’t work for this. Maybe all the case studies I read online were a scam. I was not seeing any numbers even close like other people were showing on-line. After week 2 I was feeling very defeated and questioning this whole Facebook ads thing. But remember I was committed to spending $10 a day to make this work so I carried on. Let’s see what I come up with next week.

If you did not read part 1 of the case study you can read it here.