First, if you know me at all, you know sometimes I like to just dive into things. (If you didn't know that before... well, now you know!) I don't always get my feet wet to test the waters, and sometimes, I let my impulsiveness get the best of me. I applied the same thing to running my first set of ads on Facebook. Quite frankly, I think most people.... a good percent of people... there might be some others that would have a similar approach. I mean what is there to loose, right? At most we're talking about spending 50-75 cents per click. That's not going to break the bank or anything, right? I would hope not.
Anyways, I own a small landscaping business, and I decided to select my target market: anyone living within 25 miles of a preferred city, for anyone over the age of 27. Right away, the Facebook Ads app, calculates the size of your potential market. I figure, the more, the merrier. So long as the target audience lives in the area that I serve, and is old enough to (likely) own a house with enough money to spend on landscaping, that should be fine. They do provide a place to limit your audience by education attainment, interests, gender, relationship status, and even sexual orientation/preference. Not wanting to limit myself there, I left those empty. If there was a spot for household income, and home ownership, that would be perfect, but since that isn't exactly a statistic that people want to share within their social group, I suppose I'm out of luck on that. Ideally, I would have chosen college grads only, but I didn't want to exclude people that either never went to college, or perhaps, just didn't place that info into their profile. You don't have the choice to select more than one option, as you can only choose high school, college student, or college grad or no preference. So, for that situation I let my age bracket selection be the driver there. My thoughts were to put the ad in front of as many relevant people as possible, and I'll let the audience decide if they are interested. If they are interested and they decide to click, then I'm good to go. If not, that's OK too. All I had to do then was make sure my ad had a neat looking picture, some good catchy wording (which included my phone number), set my pricing point and presto!... I was set.
So, with a simple click of the mouse on a Friday afternoon, I was in business running my first ad. Less than 5 minutes later, I got a phone call. I was impressed, and gleefully answered the phone. As it turns out, it was indeed someone who wanted my services, but, as it turned out, that fella found me on Google (where I am not currently advertising.) So, after the conversation, I looked up to view the ad performance page and I really liked what I saw. My ad had already been seen by thousands of viewers and placed thousands of times. To top that off, I was getting some clicks and, even better, a new fan who "liked" my page! I couldn't have been more pleased. Suddenly, my business was getting more attention than it probably ever had gotten before. After the first hour or so, I trustingly let Facebook do its thing. Later that evening, I checked, and I saw numbers in the tens of thousands, with several more clicks. I went to bed that evening thinking that this was the best move that I've made yet in all of the marketing that I've done. Even if not one person clicks, I'm still getting the attention of thousands of people! Genius! Right?
Waking up the next morning, I had to check the progress. A few more clicks, and the ad was still being seen by people, but just a few hundred (rather than the thousands) had seen it since midnight Pacific time (when the daily counter resets). "Not bad," I thought. After all, it was only morning. I mean, other than an ad-crazed man, who checks Facebook that early on a Saturday morning? I went on about my day, and left to go take care of the service the caller from the previous afternoon had requested. As I traveled to my job of the day, I couldn't help but wonder who all might call. After putting in a 6 hours of solid hard work, I wrapped up my job, and headed home. After a quick check, I was very disappointed. At best, only a few dozen people had seen my ad since the morning began. No wonder my phone hadn't been ringing off the hook. What gives? I wasn't sure. On Sunday, activity seemed to pick up, and I was OK with that. I figure that after an initial burst of attention, a slow-but-steady approach was not a bad way to go. Besides, I didn't want to spend all of my allocated money in just one or two days.
As my first week progressed, I let things be for the most part. At some point during the week, I updated my business page some, hoping to convert more clicks into "likes". Sometime around mid-week, I decided to try something different. Instead of tweaking my first ad, I simply added another to see what might get the most attention. After adding my new ad, I received a disturbing notice: my ad wasn't being run and I had a message attached to it suggesting that I need to either become more creative, increase my spending limit, or fine-tune my audience. Surely, I didn't need to make a more creative ad. My first ad seemed to do just fine, why would a slightly tweaked ad not be good enough for Facebook to run it? That didn't make sense, so I sent in a request for help. I got an automatic response some time later saying that a real person would review my case, and respond sometime in the next couple of business days. Fine, I'll wait, right? Well, not exactly. I decided to take things into my own hands and push my ad, rather than wait for a response. After giving it some thought, I raised my bid price some. Nothing. So, I raised my daily spend cap. I figure with two ads, I need to increase that some. Lo-and-behold, both ads were working after that change. Conveniently, I received a human response from Facebook (well, as far as I know, this guy was human), saying that my ad looked fine, and that it should be working. Well, of course it was, I'd fixed it. I didn't really need them to help me in the first place, I've got this figured out now, but thanks anyways.
As the first week drew to a close, I was pleased by my ad campaign. I hadn't brought in any new business, but at least I was getting people looking to notice that I exist. Given the time of the year (it was mid-November), you can't expect everyone to want new landscaping designs or services. On Sunday, our church did something unique: it gave away money to all who attended. The purpose was for us to take that money, somehow invest it or grow it, and then return and give it back. They did the same last year, with some people baking cookies, making lemonade, or performing gift wrapping services. It's a great idea, and I knew exactly what I could do: plant flowers. I could have my wife join me, and whoever wanted to spruce-up their home with flowers, we could do that. Later that afternoon, it hit me: I'm going to place some Facebook ads and create some awareness to what we are doing. The newly created ad was launched, and the response was unbelievable. Nearly twice the people had seen my ad (compared to the first night with my business ad), and clicks were coming in left and right. It was great. I thought, "you know, I've done the right thing here, I should have some phone calls in the morning." As the morning came, I was in shock. At the stroke of midnight, Pacific Time, my ad was virtually shut down. My ad had only been seen by one person! Take a look at the screen shot below and you can see the results.
Taking a look at that, you can see source of my frustration. Questions started rolling through my mind: Was this some discrimination against my Christmas themed ad? If that is true, how could they do such a thing? Was my daily spend cap set too low? What gives? What have I done to deserve this? Frustration. I took a screen shot, and sent it in. Unfortunately, I haven't received a response from the ad team. Either they're busy, or maybe I missed the responding email in my junk box, I'm not sure. Whatever the case might be, I knew one thing: my ad needed to return to its former glory. I decided to create another new campaign, with the hopes of catching that "beginners luck" that I seemed to have been struck with, not once, but twice. The third time around, a new campaign wasn't bringing in the same results. Now, I was stuck. Still no response to my email and my hope was dwindling. Then, I started searching online for Facebook ad problems. It seemed like I wasn't the only one with the problem. One suggestion that came to mind that my ad wasn't running with as high of a frequency because it wasn't getting a high enough click-through-rate on previous runs. Then, that's when it dawned upon me: I'm competing against all of these other ads out there. If Facebook is smart, and you know they are, then they're going to place a focus on the ads that make them the most money. They want people to click on your ads, and if people aren't clicking on it enough compared to other ads, then it'll run second (or third) fiddle to those "better" ads. It's not that my ad was bad, looked ugly, or lacked creativity, it's just the fact that a lower percent of people are going to click on it compared to other ads. Why is this? Because I'm a landscaper. Compared to a credit card, or a smartphone, not as many people are interested in landscaping. Just on the surface, not all of my targeted audience owns a home. Right there, I have a smaller percent of my selected audience than compared to an Android smartphone. Next, more people are likely to have an interest to click on a smartphone ad, rather than for some flowers. Give that some thought: not all homeowners want to pay someone to plant flowers for them. So, what can I do? I'll start by fine-tuning my audience right? It makes sense. You limit your audience, so to increase your click-through-rate. Then after some time, when Facebook detects that my ad is more effective, they'll run it more often. But, wait, there was still one more option, I can pay per each 1000 views. Hmm, that makes sense. Now I can buy views, rather than clicks. Suddenly, like a flip of a switch, I'm getting hits. Within minutes, I've blown through $5 on ads. Suddenly, an ad that hadn't seen action all day has over 8 thousand views. That was nice. But then, I've only gotten 3 clicks. That means that I'm paying $1.67 a click, or roughly twice what I was paying when my ad was being run through the first few hours of the pay-per-click rate. Unfortunately, after the initial burst of activity, things dropped off a cliff. Literally, the ad stopped running again. Then, I noticed one thing: my ad, which is set to run for 30 days, has a lifetime budget for $150 dollars. I've just busted though 1/30th of my budget. So, it makes sense that it would stop running. Facebook wants to make sure my ad runs through the duration of the campaign, while at the same time keep things within my set budget. So, there you have it. After a week and 2 days of experimenting, I seemed to have figured out what it takes to run a successful ad on Facebook. I'll keep you updated when I get more results in, but for now, I'm calling it a night!
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