I’m a huge fan of Facebook advertising, especially when my goal is driving fans. I currently have three Facebook Fan Pages: my PPC Ian Fan Page (please like me, I would truly appreciate it) and two others for my top two authority sites. The main goal of my Facebook Fan Page strategy? Drive repeat visitors to my sites, communicate with my top visitors (people who can be evangelists for my brands), and of course create SEO value (social media is driving SEO and will only continue to do so more, in my opinion). I’ve had a lot of success with my newest Facebook Fan Page. I basically went from 0 fans to 1,242 in less than a week for only $347.70. That’s only $0.28 per fan! (Make sure to check out the screenshot from my Facebook account at the bottom of this post.) These are real fans, fans who are interacting with my page, fans who are helping me build my business. I feel that this point is absolutely critical because I can get 1,242 fans for cheap on Fiverr but those wouldn’t be real, quality fans the way you can drive with a paid campaign. Today I’m excited to share my strategy!
Step 1: Leverage The $50 Coupon
First and foremost, it always pays to have a coupon. My wife found one for me in the recent issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. I put it to good use immediately and this lowered the cost basis of my campaign. If you don’t have a Facebook advertising account yet, make sure to leverage this coupon or another one when you open your new account. Even if you don’t have money to spend on your Facebook Fan Page, at least the coupon will give you $50 in free spend.
Step 2: Write Great Creative
I’m sure you’ve heard this hundreds of times, but I truly can’t underscore the importance of testing creative (both text and images). Just check out the screenshot below. The second ad is the clear winner with a CTR of 0.217%. The other ads have CTRs of 0.126% and 0.080%. What’s really crazy here is I didn’t vary my text too much. I already have a winning model that starts with "Poll" and then asks a simple question. If the answer is "yes", I ask the user to click "Like". This copy has worked really well and I encourage you to try it out. Amongst the three ads, I really did vary the images. The winning image actually surprised me, it’s hard to predict the winner so I always recommend testing!
Step 3: Give Your Facebook Campaign Time
I put a budget of $250/day on this campaign from the start. It made perfect sense, I was targeting a huge audience of around 300,000 reach. However, Facebook really surprised me this time! It seems that they throttled my campaign. Despite having a good CTR and low CPC, I didn’t hit my daily budget. The frequency is lower than I’ve seen in the past and it took many days (almost a week) to hit just half of my target audience.
I almost prefer it this way. I was able to run my campaign for about a week and I’m seeing no signs of burnout yet! I’m still running it now and perhaps the Facebook Ads team is working on the burnout problem. The moral here: We don’t appear to be in a churn and burn environment right now. I used to run Facebook campaigns that would experience ad fatigue within 24-48 hours. I’m not seeing that with my most recent campaign and recommend stretching your time horizon out a bit.
My Typical Experience With Paid Facebook Like Campaigns
Over the last year or so, I’ve run a multitude of Facebook "Like" campaigns (paid campaigns with the goal of driving likes). I’ve seen truly varied results. Some verticals, despite my best efforts, come in at a lofty $5/like. In a more typical situation, I have seen likes between $1 and $2 each. For the reasons outlined in the introduction, I can’t imagine running an authority site without at least a few hundred real, dedicated likes so I’m happy to pay the price even if it is in the $1-$2/like range.
I’m truly thrilled with this campaign, however, because I’m coming in at $0.28 per like. I spent $397.70 so far, but I got that great $50 coupon so I actually only spent $347.70. $347.70 divided by 1,242 fans is a sweet $0.28 per fan. Knowing how well my website converts and the value of these fans, I will keep running this campaign until it experiences fatigue. I expect that to happen after I hit 2,000 fans since at that point I will have hit the majority of my target audience and the ad frequency should get up to the 10+ range.
I truly hope this helps you out not only with the strategy but also with some numbers so you know what to expect. Want to learn more about driving fans on Facebook? I highly recommend my post about Three Ways To Drive More Facebook Fans. Also, Acquisio’s free Facebook Webinar is truly awesome. What has been your experience? Anyone driven fans via paid Facebook campaigns for less than $0.28/fan?
Image in this post © PPCIan.com
I’ve moved almost all my major campaigns onto facebook and love it so far! I still use search, but facebook has been able to get me a lot more traffic, not to mention for cheaper clicks!
By the way, your .217 ctr should be getting you cheaper clicks than .21 cents! I don’t drive traffic to fan pages, but the cheapest avg click price I was able to get was .04 cents on around a 1 mill demographic range! Dried up after a week or so but it was really profitable! 🙂
Awesome case study, Ian. Good idea using the free Facebook ad coupon, too. I’ve seen many fan pages utilize some sort of incentive (e.g. The most comments in a certain time period wins an iPad 2). This would definitely spur some activity within a fan page discussion.
That’s incredible, I’m going to go like your page for free! 🙂
But there’s only 877 atm, so I guess you lost some…
Good stuff, Ian. I like the new stats on Facebook, but I still miss the new ones every once and a while. Decent results at $0.28 per click. Keep split testing those creatives and get that CPF (cost per fan) even lower!
Thanks, Dino! That’s awesome to hear most of your campaigns are on FB. Agreed with my CTR they should charge less! Perhaps I’m in a really competitive vertical, or it’s a function of me bidding too high (could probably experiment with bid reductions and/or CPM bidding). $0.04 CPC, that is sweet! 🙂
All the best,
Ian
VisibleRank,
Thanks so much! 🙂 You are absolutely right! Those contests work really well. Also, having a custom FBML landing page that encourages the like would help further as well. For this specific case, I’m just sending to the wall so far (and I’m really surprised how well its converting). Thanks again!
All the best,
Ian
Collabo,
You rock! Thanks for the like! Actually, this case is for one of my sites other than PPC Ian. 🙂 Right now I’m up to 1,600+ fans and counting. Super exciting stuff. I probably should do a paid campaign for PPC Ian soon.
All the best,
Ian
Thanks, Justin! I very much appreciate it. Definitely going to keep testing. 🙂
Hi Ian, I actually found a whole bunch of Facebook coupons in INC. magazine. My problem is how do I make multiple Facebook accounts since they only allow 1 credit card per user? If you have a way please email me I have some extra coupons if you want one 🙂
Hi Ethan,
Thanks for the comment and great question. I make it standard practice to create a brand new Facebook account for each of my websites. While I’m a long term buy and hold type guy, you just never know – maybe I’ll end up selling one of my websites. Along those lines, I always try to keep my Facebook, Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter, YouTube, and other accounts completely separate for each site.
By doing so, I’m able to use the $50 FB coupon for each website while also keeping the accounts separate. The easiest way to accomplish this is to first create a unique email address for each of your sites (you can just use Gmail or Hotmail as two easy options). It seems like Facebook does not like it when I use email addresses that are not from one of these big guys. (webmaster@MyDomainNameHere dot com, for example, never ends up working for me.) Then, you want to go to http://www.facebook.com/advertising/ and click create an ad. It will walk you through the registration process (use your new email address) and allow you to create a brand new account even if you already have another account.
With each new account, you can use a new $50 coupon. I have been able to use the same credit card across accounts, which is a great thing. Hope this helps and please don’t hesitate to reach out with further questions.
All the best,
Ian
Congrats for the good result. I remember I draw almost the same number of fans within only a week with a little blackhat method. But just like another blackhat method, it doesn’t last long lol. And there was actually NO interactions in the page, probably because most of them were ‘forced’ to like the page lol. But seriously, the money you spent there really worth the result. I think I’ll try that out myself one day too. Thanks for sharing, Ian.
Thanks so much Erwin for the comment! I always recommend going the white hat route, and am glad you brought up this point. Everyone: Please, please go about Internet marketing in a white hat fashion. It pays off, is better for the user, and is sustainable. 🙂 Thanks again Erwin for sharing your experience!
All the best,
Ian