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In today's newsletter...
My Facebook Advertising Experiment
By Jim Daniels
You've probably seen a lot of products being sold lately that
focus on facebook advertising. Many of them hype up facebook ads as the
new hidden gold mine for marketers. So I decided to do a little
experimenting for my loyal subscribers.
If you're considered throwing down some cash on facebook ads,
you may want to read my results first. I sure was in for some
surprises! I'll share them with you right after this quick message from today's
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My
facebook advertising experiment begins:
As sort of a non-social marketer,
(hey, I'm a little shy) the first thing I had to do was activate
the facebook account I opened a year ago and never logged into
once. The first thing I found was 150 or so friends waiting for
confirmation. That was a nice surprise even though I had no idea
where they came from.
(Incidentally, you can
add me as a friend here if you want. I hope that's the right
address, I'm new at this facebook stuff.)
While I plan to expand on the
no-cost facebook marketing aspect later this year, what I really
wanted to experiment with
first were the facebook paid ads. So I jumped right to that section
of my account.
The first thing I discovered was how
simple it was to create an ad. I mean, I did it from start to
finish in about 10 minutes. That was nothing like the Adwords
process I went through when I tried that platform. Facebook has
done a great job in simplifying the process.
The first ad I placed was for one of
my own sites on Internet marketing. I wrote a clever title and
ad copy,
selected my demographic by choosing people interested in
business, marketing, home business, etc. I chose the low end of
the suggested bid, around 60 cents per click, and submitted the
ad.
A few hours later I received the bad
news...
- Ad Disapproved
What's that? Did I make a mistake in
the ad? I clicked on facebook's disapproval reason and discovered something that
all those hyped up sales letters for facebook advertising secrets
never revealed...
Facebook does not accept ads for
sites related to making money from home.
Bummer. I mean,
I've helped a lot of people make money from home over the years.
Why can't I offer my help to more people via facebook ads?
After giving it some thought, I
considered that maybe facebook had good reason. There are so
many not-so-legit money making schemes out there these days, I
can certainly understand their thinking when they decided to
leave out these ads.
So although I was a bit
disappointed, I decided to move on. I'd advertise an affiliate
link for a respectable
stock market investment product I knew about. I
wrote up an ad, chose my demographic age 35-55 who were
interested in trading and stock market investing, and bid 40
cents per click.
A few hours later I received the bad
news...
- Ad Disapproved
Hmmm.. I couldn't find anything in
their guidelines that ruled out investing sites. Must fall under
their guidelines on prohibiting money making type sites.
Oh well, I decided to move on to
something I knew would get approved. I visited the clickbank
marketplace and found some sports niches I've always wanted to try. The
first one was a basketball training program that advertised a
great conversion rate of better than 3%.
I wrote up a clever ad, chose my
demographic age 18-35 year old men who were interested in
playing basketball, and bid 40 cents per click.
Within a few hours the ad was approved
and started running. Finally cleared that hurdle!
After a few hours I had 102 clicks to my
affiliate site. I logged into clickbank to see if that 3%
conversion rate they bragged about had resulted in three
sales. Unfortunately, there were zero sales. Bummer. I paid an average of 33
cents per click so that was $33 down the drain.
I decided to lower my bid to see if
I could still get traffic to that site. I dropped my max bid to 16 cents and
sure enough, the traffic continued. In fact, over the next few
days I received 248,709 ad impressions, 0.107% click thru rate
and 267 total visitors.
That was an interesting discovery.
It seems that facebook's suggested bid was much higher than what was
required to get traffic. I made a note of that and it held up in
all the other niches I tried. Big money saver.
So now that I had 267 visitors to
that site I surely must have made a few sales, right?
I logged into clickbank to see how
many sales I had made.
Still zero. Bummer.
OK, $43.25 down
the drain. No bid deal. I just need to test more niches.
And that's what I did.
Right after this quick sponsor message
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Next I tried another niche, one of my favorites... Golf.
I found an attractive golf training product in clickbank and
started running a facebook ad for it. 300 visitors and $41
in clicks later, zero sales.
What's going on here? Are facebook users non-buyers?
Not being one to give up too quickly, I found a different
clickbank golf product and switched the URL on my ad to the new
product.
60 visitors later, bingo! A sale! $34.75 in profit on only
$8.32 in advertising.
Now I was onto something.
If I could multiply the traffic to this new, better
converting offer maybe I could spend $100 a day and make $400.
So I increased my ad budget from $10 a day to $35 and started
lowering my bids little by little.
And the traffic poured in. Over the next four days I spent
$140 more in advertising. I received more than 1,000 clicks to
my affiliate page at an average of 14 cents each.
I logged into clickbank hoping to see 15 sales or so but
there were only 3. A net loss of $40. Bummer.
Gold mine? No. But still no reason to give up. In fact, I'm tweaking that
campaign currently to get cheaper clicks and more sales. I see
lots of potential here.
But even with this "almost success" I realize the
real key to success with PPC is to keep trying more niches. Ask any PPC advertiser who's had success
and they'll tell you that you need to try 10-15 niches before
you find a profitable niche.
So that's what I'm doing now. I mean, it
takes literally 15 minutes to find a new product at clickbank
and plug in an ad at facebook. I simply set my daily ad budget
to $10 then see what happens after 100 clicks.
As I write
this today, so far I have tested 6 different niches from golf to
magic to farmville to relationships.
So far of the six niches I've tested, only the golf niche has
made ANY sales.
All together I've spent a little over $200 and earned back a
little more than half that.
So, by now you may be thinking that maybe facebook advertising is
not that great. I've even seen many bloggers bash it after their
own zero sales experiences.
But I say not so fast.
Sure, facebook users may not be searching for solutions like
Goggle searchers, so they may be less likely to buy. But they do
still buy, I've proven that.
Facebook advertising may also be better suited to "branding"
type ad campaigns. After all,
if a business can get 10 million impressions for a few thousand
bucks and earn back part of that money with some sales, that's
not a bad deal. That is, if you have deep pockets like big
companies.
But if you're someone trying to make a buck from home, instead of
digging deep into your pockets, you're going to need to keep
digging DEEP for the right niche and the right products. Basically experimenting like
I'm doing.
I'm not done with this experiment just yet. Even though I'm losing a
little money so far with facebook ads, I do see lots of
potential for this. Here's why...
I love being able to target by age, by gender, and by marital
status. I also like being able to show my ads only to people interested in
a certain topic.
Another great advantage is that currently I can advertise affiliate links directly,
without building landing pages. (Something you can't do with
Google Adwords.) Plus, I've found I can get traffic in most
niches for less than a dime per click. Good luck getting Google adwords clicks for
even five times that in most niches.
Heck, I know some folks paying more than a dollar a click.
So in closing, facebook ads may not be the gold mine some
people make it out to be, but then again, it takes a lot of
panning to strike gold. I have a feeling some marketers will do
just that.
As for me, I'll keep trying different niches and reporting on them in
the gazette occasionally. It's sort of fun and I can do most everything from
my iphone in 10 minute stretches, like while I'm waiting for my
wife or kids to come out of a store. So stay tuned for future
reports on this topic...
I hope today's issue helps shed a little non-hyped light on this new
advertising medium.
See ya in a few
weeks...
Jim Daniels
Jim at bizweb2000.com
make-a-living-online.com
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