Welcome to One Woman Experiments, where daring business women experiment with different parts of their business in order to find best practices. We hope these mini-experiments help improve your business and inspire you to test-drive new strategies. Have an experiment you want to test out and document? Check out our ideas and guidelines!
Ah, Facebook- as business owners, it's our best friend and mortal enemy. With the changing algorithms, it's getting more and more difficult to build traction without paying for Facebook ads. So, Laura C George, a consultant who works with artists, decided to test-drive Facebook ads and report back with her results.
What is your experiment and why?
I tried out Facebook Ads to promote a webinar. I've heard some good things about these ads like the fact that you can set a reasonable price to spend, whatever reasonable means to you. And I heard they're really effective, generating more Facebook likes or business leads. So I decided to test drive a Facebook Ad.
Tell us your methodology.
I used a great LKR Social Media article to devise my master plan. First, I designed a regular post for my page, with an image attached. This became the basis of my ad.
Then I went into the Ads Manager to create an ad. I followed the steps in the LKR article, targeting:
- People who live in the US, Ireland, Canada, or the UK
- Women who are 25-45 years old
- People who like "visual arts," "arts and music," "painting," "fine art," "illustration," or "printmaking"
- People who graduated from college
- People who speak some version of English
- People who are not already connected to Laura C George (my page)
- And people whose friends are already connected to Laura C George
I let my max bid be at the top edge of the suggested bid, which was $0.70 and asked to spend no more than $10 a day for 8 days.
I'll note here that I didn't think ahead of time to set up goals in Google Analytics that would have allowed me to track which webinar signups came from this ad and which ones were from other Facebook activity.
How did you feel when you adopted the new practice?
It was really exciting to track the ad as it was going on, watching the impressions and clicks add up.
With the above specifications, I got 30,304 impressions (number of times my ad was seen), 98 clicks on the ad (in certain situations you can like the page or click the website link without clicking on the ad as well) giving the ad a decent click through rate of 0.32%. There is also the "unique click through rate" which is the percentage who clicked on the ad out of just the number of unique people who saw the ad - mine was 1.11%.
My cost per click was only 51 cents and I spent less than $50 total during the whole campaign. I also found it interesting that people saw my ad an average of 4 times and a decent number of people clicked on the ad multiple times, meaning that people who were interested were very interested.
And I found that a lot of people were telling me they saw the ad and it reminded them they hadn't liked my page yet, so I increased my page likes by another 20 - a big deal when you're under 500. Because I didn't properly track how my webinar signups got to the page, I can't tell exactly how well my ad converted for this particular project.
Any revolutionary/surprising insights? What was the toughest/best part of your experiment? Do you think you'll stick with it?
I can tell that Facebook Ads are a really inexpensive way to get new leads into your business. So when you're on a budget or just want to really fine-tune who sees your ad, this is the most effective advertising.
The hardest part of this experiment was getting my hopes too high. With all the excitement around Facebook Ads, I expected to gain hundreds of new likes for my $50. With this experiment under my belt, I have a more realistic view of this method of advertising. I can also now refine how I create my original page post - using an image that is designed to become an ad (it needs to pop out on the page more and more clearly show what the ad is about), fitting a link into the short summary on the ad (so people can directly click to my site instead of having to click the ad before clicking into my site), and adjusting the wording to very briefly entice people to click.
But I will definitely try again. I'm eager to see if I can beat my numbers the next time around, armed with experience.
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