Watch the video above to see the video version of this post.
Today in this blog post I am going to share with you a case study of my first Facebook Ads campaign. The overall goal of the campaign is to get email leads and build my email list for buildingsocialproof.com at $1 per email subscriber.
My campaign was not to boost a Facebook post or try to make direct sales from Facebook (I have heard in general that’s a really bad idea), or just to get likes to my page. So I want to be really clear, my goal was to get leads for my business and that should be your goal too. Maybe you have a local business. You can do the same thing to get calls to your business. Have people actually call you on the phone or maybe you want to build an email list like I am doing to build an audience for your business.
Throughout the campaign, I use the Facebook Power-Editor. It is not that hard to use and everyone says to use it. So that’s what I did and here is the URL where you can go check it out. I recommend you do that too:
https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/powereditor/
Now here is a tip with the Power-Editor, remember you have to download and then upload your video changes to Facebook, otherwise Facebook will never see your changes. So just remember that you have to use the download and upload button with the Power-Editor. It’s a little strange but you will get used to it pretty quick.
Now the first thing to do is to set up the campaign and this is what the screen looks like, you just put in a campaign name.
Now I picked the buying type of auction. I picked the objectives to have Facebook try to get me cheap clicks to my website. That was a bad choice. I will show you why in a later post. I wanted to show you all the mistakes I made along the way, so you can learn from them as you see me blow my cash. I mean why should you waste money like I am as I am trying to learn Facebook Ads? Hopefully I can help you out and save you some money.
So the next thing to do is find out who to target and in the Facebook Power-Editor they call that creating your adset. So here are some ad targeting tips that I found after reading a lot of blog posts online. You could read all the blog posts yourself or just look at my tips here:
Tip: Leave Most People Out Of The Party
Number One is to leave most people out of the party. You need to get very, very specific on who you are targeting with Facebook. It’s very powerful and it can get specific on who you target. So you want to be very specific here are the base things that you want to start targeting. Number 1 is to target location. You don’t want your ad showing all over the entire planet, and if you don’t tell Facebook specifically who you want to target you will target the entire planet. So think long and hard about the location of where your ideal prospects live.
Next is to target the language. If you are doing English ads, you don’t want Spanish speaking people to see your ads. So make sure you pick English. Next is to think about the age group of your ideal customers and the gender of your ideal customers. Don’t test age and gender in the beginning. After you start running your ads Facebook is going to automatically (in a report) dice these up for you and show you the best age groups and best gender to get cheaper ads. So I wouldn’t start with those. Just know that you can target them and we will do it later.
Tip: Keep Audience size 200,000 people or lower
The big one you want to use is Interests and Behaviors. That’s how you can really narrow down and target people. The big tip is you really want to get your audience less than 200,000 people. If you have millions of people you are too broad. Your ads aren’t focused enough and they are just not going to work well for you. Picking Fan Pages of other businesses like your own works good for a lot of people. I went that route. Now let’s look at the campaigns I came up with.
I wanted to compare two different audiences so I could see which one was cheaper. I mean one of them is going to be cheaper than the other. Then I could go find other audiences and compare them against the cheapest one to find even cheaper audiences. I think you get the idea. Kind of an A/B test of different audiences. So here are two audiences I came up with:
Audience #1 Smart Passive Income
The #1 audience I picked was Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn. It’s a podcast to show people how to make money on-line. It’s a really good podcast. I figured a lot of people who want to start a business making money on-line probably needed a social media strategy. So I targeted these people. I picked English speaking. Male only. Ages 25-50. I want them to be making some money. Over 50 grand a year so they could afford my products and services. I only want to target the US Only. I did not want to target the entire planet. I set the campaign at an affordable rate for me which is $5 a day. I am just getting started. I don’t want to spend a $100 a day on Facebook ads especially they are not going to work. So I want to make sure it works first.
Audience #2 Social Media Examiner
Audience #2 was for Social Media Examiner. It’s the exact audience against Smart Passive Income (audience #1). I am literally comparing these two audiences. Both campaigns are Mobile and desktop Newsfeeds only. I didn’t pick the little ads that appear on the side bar, on the desktop because frankly I don’t think they are very effective. I have never personally clicked on one of those. So I wanted to get in the Newsfeed and pay a premium but get the results.
Notice I set a total budget of only $10 a day. I picked two $5 campaigns and I am testing them against each other. It’s affordable for me, and this will become crucial throughout the campaign. I will show you why later in this article. Next is creating your ad and here are my Ad Creation Tips.
Ad Creation Tips
Images are the most important part of your Facebook ads. The Facebook Image Size is 1200 x 628 pixels that’s good to know as you are putting your images together. Try to use images of people smiling and having a great time. Those tend to convert better and pick images that stand out and are colorful. Add text to your images, those help them stand out and get more attention.
Now Facebook has a grid checker tool for your text/image ratio. They don’t want your text being more than 20% of your image. It’s a really easy tool to use. You just upload your picture and it gives you some squares. You draw them around your text, and it will tell you the percentage if you ad will get approved or not. So if you are using text that’s a great resource that you need to be using.
https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay
Here are the 4 Ads I came up with:
We can see they all are identical. I did put the URL to Building Social Proof above the picture because I also read that it will get you some clicks and it will just make the ad work better. So I did that. I got some text at the top and you can see the four images are of attractive women. That’s why I picked the male group only in my audience. It also has some text in there. I basically want to see which image is going to perform the best and then I am going to use that image and then start tweaking the ad from there. So that’s my strategy and you can see what my ads look like.
Finally you need somewhere to send people after they click on your ad. Here’s the landing pages I came up with:
On the left you see the desktop view and on the right the mobile view because I am getting both mobile and desktop traffic. I will show you that later. The neat thing with this landing page I created is that it just has a sign-in with Facebook button. Now I know everybody’s coming from Facebook so they all have a Facebook account. They just have to click the button to sign up.
I have figured with mobile this would be a big win because having to type your email address into a mobile phone I don’t like doing it. It’s kind of hard to do. But if I just have to click a button and sign in with Facebook that’s really not a lot of effort. I also get the Facebook email address which I think is a higher quality email address than what people would probably just type into a browser. So that’s what my landing page looked like. Nothing fancy but I think the Facebook ad sign in button will work good for me.
Here are my results from Week #1:
So I got the campaign started on a Friday and I ran it over the weekend. I spent $24. Now I wanted Facebook to find me cheap clicks. I don’t know about you, but when I look at articles online I see clicks for like $.10 and $.15 and $.25. Not $2.15 each. So I was really, really, bumped out Monday when I looked at what my campaign did over the weekend. I mean 6 clicks at $2.15 each? I didn’t convert anybody. But if I did convert like 1 in 5, or 1 in 6 on my landing page, you are still talking $15 or $20 per email lead. That’s nowhere close to $1 per email lead where I am trying to get. So, the campaign at this point to me looks awful. I like really just want to quit at it. I am not seeing anything like the other case studies on Facebook. That’s why I want to post this one. If you are just starting out and have these results don’t get too bumped out. I am going through it too, and I am just going to start from there.
I also want to show you that 98.7% of the Facebook Ads were Mobile:
So when you are setting up your Facebook Ads you want to think long and hard about how your site looks on a Mobile phone because almost all your ads are going to be served to mobile phones. That’s one takeaway I want you to get from this. Also when you are creating your Ads make sure to check the mobile preview. The Facebook Ads look slightly different in Mobile. Just know that all your traffic is going to be Mobile so just start thinking in the mindset of Mobile first.
So here are some big takeaways and lessons I learned from my first week: Set your Budget ahead of time. Most people fail at Facebook ads because they quit too soon. I will tell you if I didn’t have a budget set ahead of time that I am going to “spend $10 a day for at least a month to try this” I would have quit after the first weekend. I mean I spent $25 bucks and didn’t have a single result from it. After you put in all that work to set up the ads it is pretty disheartening. I probably would have just quit if I didn’t have a budget preset ahead of time. So think long and hard, if you can only do $5 a day then just do $5 a day. But you have to think of something affordable that you can live with.
Stay tuned in until my next post. Let’s see if I can do some things to start getting these ad costs down and start trying to get my email subscriptions to get around a $1. Because right now they are nowhere close. I mean I spent 25 bucks on this campaign and haven’t even got a single opt in. In the next blog post we are going to look at what I did at Week #2 to try to change this around and start getting better results.
Read Part 2 of My Facebook Ads Case Study Here