Leaving The Day Job

Unlike many in the affiliate marketing world I’d had a bit of success with Facebook Ads but I’ve had enough of them now and I’m moving myself into the sceptics’ camp. In my previous posts I’ve written about the ups and downs and given a couple of tips I’d picked up on the way. I thought I had it figured. This week, Facebook decided to pull the rug from underneath me.

First up, they’ve taken to pulling ads without so much as a hint what the problem might be. In fact, they give you a hint as to what the problem almost certainly isn’t. I had one ad pulled because the ad wasn’t representative of the product. Except it was. It said “Get a free Nintendo Wii when you buy a qualifying mobile” and took you to the merchant’s site where the qualifying mobiles are displayed. Apparently this isn’t enough.

A second ad was pulled because “The text and/or image of this ad violates part or all of sections 4, 5, and 6 of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines.” So I emailed them to find out what was wrong. Apparently if you run an ad for a dating site you have to mention the site name in the ad. Is this in their terms and conditions? No, it isn’t.

Now I don’t mind Facebook having rules. I don’t even mind them having quirky rules for no good reason. But what I do mind is them having secret rules they don’t bother to tell anyone and which require several emails before they’ll even tell you.

The second thing relates to stats. I’ve blogged before about the bizarre stats system which shows you rolling totals for the past 24 hours. There’s no historical data other than the total number of impressions and clicks per day. You can’t see which ad has been getting the clicks. There’s no way to export data for analysis. There’s no indication of how CPC relates to the number of impressions you get. You end up spending all day checking your stats and babysitting your bids just to make sure you aren’t blowing all your budget.

Which brings me to my third point: the daily budget limit which isn’t limited. Half way through one day last week I decided my return on Facebook ads was in danger of falling too low. So I lowered my daily budget to make sure I didn’t end up spending more than I was comfortable with losing if conversions dropped off. I was somewhat surprised therefore that I ended that day exceeding my new budget. Again, I don’t mind too much if a budget can’t be changed during the day but if that’s the case then tell me about it! Don’t just leave me to figure it out after the fact.

All in all I’ve decided that Facebook ads are more trouble than they’re worth. It’s mainly poor execution and Facebook’s characteristic disregard for what anyone thinks of them. They’ve already backpedalled on Beacon, let’s hope they go and rethink the rest of their ad platform too.

Regular readers will be pleased to know this is the last posting I’m doing on Facebook for a while. I never intended to write this much about them. I hope it’s at least been some use to someone.

OK, so that’s a bit of a linkbait post title and I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers or to have made a huge fortune but I am going to detail what’s worked for me so far with Facebook ads. Standard disclaimer stuff: this is what works for me, your mileage may vary etc etc

First off, I think you need a different frame of mind dealing with Facebook ads than with your standard PPC ads. With the likes of Adwords you’re wanting to find people who are searching for a product, ready to buy it with their credit card clasped firmly in their hot little paw. Facebook users, on the other hand, aren’t looking to buy anything, they’re looking at their mate’s wedding photos or attacking someone’s vampire/zombie/whatever. Facebook ads are more about saying “hey, look at this cool product, you might like it” rather than “hey, here’s the thing you’re looking for, now buy it”.

Obviously, Christmas is fast approaching and so the products that are doing well for me are gifts. I’m taking advantage of the demographic targeting on Facebook to put the ads in front of people who I think are likely to buy them as gifts for someone else. So if you were selling kid’s toys for example, you might want to target married people over thirty. Choose a product which is unusual and has an interesting photo. Facebook ads have very little space for text and a picture says a thousand words. Use the title to get attention and gear it towards the audience you’re targeting. Use the ad body to bullet point one or two key features and include a call to action.

As I’ve previously blogged, Facebook ads seem to be hooked up to some kind of random number generator where money is concerned. Unlike Adwords you don’t get told what the minimum bid is, nor do you get any idea of how many impressions you’re likely to get for any given bid. What you do you get though is an estimate of how many people match your chosen demographic profile. If your targeting is too precise you’ll end up with a couple of dozen users in your potential audience; too broad and there’ll be millions of them. I suspect that Facebook some how takes the size of the audience into consideration along with your PPC bid when deciding which ad to show. But I’ll be damned if I can find any rhyme or reason to it!

So how do we choose a bid amount? My technique so far is a fairly unsophisticated method called trial and error. I start a new ad at 10c per click and wait to see what happens. If the ad start rolling merrily away I reduce the bid and see what happens. If it stubbornly refuses to show itself I up the bid. You can change the bid at any time and it seems that that immediately affects your click cost but the decision as to whether your ad actually runs or not seems to happen less often.

As an example, I created an ad this afternoon with a bid of 10c. After half an hour nothing had happened. Impressions stayed on zero. So I went up to 20c, 50c and then, in frustration, a dollar and still nothing happened. I put it back to 50c and left it. An hour or so later I logged back in to see that I’d had several thousand impressions and one click at 22c. I took the bid down to 10c and the ad carried on rolling. So the advice there is not to be in too much of a rush to see the outcome of your bid changes. And conversely, don’t leave a high bid unsupervised as it might suddenly start draining your balance. I’ve also noticed that if you change your daily maximum spend during the day, the change won’t kick in til the following day. So if you hit your max spend by lunchtime you don’t seem to be able to restart your ads until the morning.

This is still a small scale trial and so far my ad spend is only in double figures but at least I’m making a positive return on investment. Whether this is scaleable longer term and to larger amounts remains to be seen. We need to bear in mind that the more targeted our ads the sooner ad fatigue will kick in because we’ll keep showing the same ad to the same people. I think a possible route to success is in creating lots of mini campaigns, tightly targeted, keeping a close eye on ROI and killing them when they stop making steady profits.

I’ve been experimenting with the new Facebook Ads platform. My ads have been running for a bit over 24 hours and have resulted in 20 clicks and zero sales which has cost me $1.63 (about 77p). The point of this post though isn’t about Facebook ads themselves but about my perceptions of the kind of person who would click my ad.

I’m advertising a digital photo frame which I thought of as being a geeky male gadget so I targeted males 18-35 with interests listed in photography and/or computers. Hardly anyone clicked. So out of curiosity I created a second ad, exactly the same as the first but this time targeted to females of any age who list photography as an interest. Here’s the results after one day:

Click through rate for the ad targeted at women is seven times higher. I can see four possible explanations here:

1. Women are more interested in gadgets than I thought
2. Women are more likely to click ads than men
3. Women are more inclined to “window shop”
4. My dataset is way too small to be drawing conclusions from and I should go back to doing some proper work instead of blogging about my attempts to understand women