OP, if you're reading this, how did you get such low CPC rates on facebook?
No offense, but this post just sortof sounds like bragging. What were you targeting? What were you bids? What did your ad actually look like? What sort of picture did you use (facebook ads require a picture, last I checked).
Etc. etc.
This is really interesting to me, because I've tried facebook ads before and done miserably with them. I was planning on doing some more reddit self-serve advertising this week, but if you can get traffic from facebook for as cheap as you're claiming, I would definitely give that a try instead.
This would be a really great post if you could share some of the research you did.
The other site is interesting as they're using a somewhat unorthodox strategy, generally most people who do FB optimizations buy CPM rather than CPC as FB charge a premium for CPC adverts.
I'm guessing the reason they're getting cheap traffic is that their targeting countries where very few people advertise so there's almost no competition for traffic. It's an approach I hadn't really considered.
You can buy FB ads either on a CPM or a CPC basis.
If you buy CPC ads, FB shows your ads to users who are more likely to click on ads, but you'll pay a lot for this service.
CPM prices are much cheaper. From my experience if you've got a CTR of over 0.025% (1 in 4000 views) then paying CPM is cheaper than CPC. And you should be able to get a CTR over that for most things.
General opinion among the FB ads community seems to be that paying CPC is a suckers games, FB are just using CPC pricing to exploit unsophisticated ad buyers.
Thanks for posting that link, definitely much more informative than the original post. I'm not sure if it was quite as shocking to everyone else but I had previously written off facebook ads. I'll definitely be giving this a try.
And great timing too, I posted a question that this answers about an hour ago. ("How do I improve marketing without being a domain expert?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2408842)
Definitely going to write an article on this topic, but image and keyword targeting are the two big ones. But a lot of it is just about knowing what to A/B test and the mistakes to avoid.
The best guide I've seen for optimizing online is the Shoemoney guide:
Why didn't you wait to submit this until you actually had something to show, then? Could you even give a couple of tips other than "be good at targeting"?
Sorry, I'm not trying to be snarky, maybe I haven't had enough coffee today or something.
I don't normally have a set period of time in mind, I just do it until it has enough views/clicks for the difference to look statistically significant.
I probably should be doing actual statistical significance testing, but I'm lazy, so just do it intuitively.
And about 200% better than when I used the profile pic image that I use on the Facebook page (from what I've heard on the grapevine company logos while great for branding tend to have very low CTRs):
(these datapoints aren't in the image I show on my blog; I tested them after I wrote most of that article and took that snapshot)
I should also point out that in CoderStack's ad campaigns cartoon images performed worse of all the images I tested, for CoderStack the best performing images were photographs of people. So there's no "one-size-fits-all" solution.
Cool, I guess one aspect of your best one here would be that it's more interesting the the equally easy to read logo. The other 2 cartoon images are probably hard to get at a glance at the small size you see the ad images at.
It's interesting because the limited campaign I have dealt with before used a logo and tagline type display, probably not the best.
None of them are readable at that size, it's about the general look. I don't know if these links are permalinks or not but here's the images at Facebook Ad size:
http://www.dipoll.com/blog/2010/11/six-steps-to-run-cheap-an...
OP, if you're reading this, how did you get such low CPC rates on facebook?
No offense, but this post just sortof sounds like bragging. What were you targeting? What were you bids? What did your ad actually look like? What sort of picture did you use (facebook ads require a picture, last I checked).
Etc. etc.
This is really interesting to me, because I've tried facebook ads before and done miserably with them. I was planning on doing some more reddit self-serve advertising this week, but if you can get traffic from facebook for as cheap as you're claiming, I would definitely give that a try instead.
This would be a really great post if you could share some of the research you did.