Here's the problem: I only have a small budget I can afford and that is 15€ per day, per platform.
1. With Facebook, they say they sent more than double the clicks Analytics tells me they sent and the clicks that do pass through have an almost 100% bounce rate with average time spent on page of 0 seconds. For example, they say they sent 300 clicks in a week, but I only see 120-130 in Analytics.
2. With the same ad, on Reddit Ads, I see in Analytics 90-95% of the clicks they said they sent and the bounce rate is about 82%, with more than 3 minutes average sessions.
With both platforms I run an ad and then a retargeting ad. Until now, this was the only strategy that had relative success.
All the people that consulted on the ads said that with 15€ per day, Facebook gives 0 results, which I already saw and I find disappointing. The only explanation I can find is that on Facebook I only get bot clicks.
Are there any other platforms that are more suitable for my budget?
Take a step back and look at the bigger picture: You're marketing to parents who are educated, have likely travelled places themselves. They're reasonably well off to consider this a small expense. These are parents who are professionals. They likely work for big companies. Big companies with HR departments.
Instead of selling to the parents, sell to the "Head of HR" person in large companies. You find these people on LinkedIn. They, too, are likely parents. And the pitch becomes that it's a lovely gift to employees (for Xmas, for their b-day, as new joiners), at a highly attractive price point, which will keep on giving all year round. As a bonus, gift them personally a subscription for their own children. (Your product becomes the marketing. This is where it costs you.)
Only this time, for every person converted, you'll get hundreds, possibly thousands of sales.
To combat this, you can set up scroll tracking. There are some GTM templates out there. Every time someone scrolls to a percentage of the whole of a page (for instance, 25% of the page but you can set it for pixels too), you can push data to the server. This artificially reduces bounce rate (yay?) but it gives you a much better idea of if people are actually getting anywhere in your content. It's actionable to know how far people are willing to scroll down your page.
Facebook Ads, like many platforms, have terrible placements by default that get mis-clicks that drive lots of clicks in the Facebook UI. Lots of these people click the back button before they even get to your site so analytics does not fire. A good example is an in-app ad where a user gets a reward for watching your ad. They may accidentally thumb it. Turn off all placements except Feed for FB & IG. These are the most expensive but the most reliable and highest quality for a small budget.
Ads are ruthless in the early stages unless you have a truly unique product/service and can run Google Ads. If I had a unique offering ("world's only data center ____ solution" then I would start there.
If you're a me-too company or just offering services, I would evaluate ads vs other channels like sales.
On a side project last summer, I was able to work with a company running education niche groups. To join 10 of their groups (total reach probably around 30k audience) was $500 per month billed on PayPal. Could make a post per day in all 10 groups, so 300 posts. The conversion rate was better than any other paid advertising we had tried and the targeting was much easier.
It’s easy to get started: find a few Facebook groups you might be interested in joining, go to about this group, add the admin as a friend/send a message request, and ask about advertising opportunities. Be sure to show them your project, and why you think it would be beneficial to their audience, that will help your case!
Also - have you thought about going to teachers with your product (assuming it’s compass letters from your post history), getting them on a free subscription, and hoping the kids go home and tell their parents they want to get the letters too?
I'm not trying to be harsh here, but the reality is that very few people will buy, based on your offer, unless they already know and like you in some way.
In addition, many of the things you're offering are avaiable for free, online, in a digital format, or from bigger companies with large budgets, in magazine formats. It's not clear what sets you apart, or why it would be worth parting with my hard earned money.
You're asking people for their money -- but you're landing page copy needs a lot of work. That is the problem you're running into.
Before having a successful advertising campaign, you will have to spend a lot of time iterating and testing different offers, to see what works and what doesn't. That's the stage you're at right now.
From our experience you need to be spending 8-10x that per day to kick start a campaign on Facebook.
Additionally, depending on your projects market Facebook/Instagram results can vary very widely. Targeting is hard, you can obviously use Facebooks audience tools to try and target but from our experience these can be difficult to get right. Without a little more information about your project I can't really suggest anything else. This is where the ML targeting is essential but as I said that need significant traffic to work.
> Facebook ... say they sent 300 clicks in a week, but I only see 120-130 in Analytics
This is about right from our estimation, it's a fairly new occurrence and down to Apples tracking changes that came in with iOS 14.5. If your target market are likely to have a large proportion of iOS users the tracking of Facebook ads has gotten quite bad. We estimate that up to 60% of iOS clicks are not tracked by Facebook/Analytics, Facebook obviosly know someone clicked the ad, but after that the tracking can break very easily. This is particularly bad for conversion tracking.
We have also experienced big problems with tracking people who leave the Facebook in app browser and move to their main browser to continue. We have found popping up a message encouraging them to open in their main browser if they try to navigate away from the landing page works well. It ensures that any Facebook/Analytics url args are still present in the URL when they move browser, setting a new tracking cookie based on them.
When we introduced this before Christmas we saw a massive increase in general trackability with Facebook.
> Are there any other platforms that are more suitable for my budget?
I would consider Google search result ads, it potentially allows you to target people who are already looking for something like what you are doing. It tends to have a significantly higher conversion rate than display advertising. Particularly at your daily budget it would be easer to play with, although at 15€/day you will only be getting 10-20ish (ballpark) clicks per day. If you have a conversion rate of say 2.5% (again about ballpark) then that's about 1 conversion every two-four days.
What I started doing next is laser focused prospecting and reaching out to them directly. That has been more successful, although feels sleazy and from time to time people get pretty mad about the outreach.
So try to figure out who benefits the most from your solution, and how you can find them. Then tailor your sales material for them, find them and reach out to them.
Prospecting will help you make better ads as well if you want to continue with them.
Sounds like a lot of work? It is! Good luck with your project!!
1 - What is the ROI on the Reddit ads? Maybe it's worth spending $30/day on Reddit rather than splitting between that and a platform with -100% ROI. You need to reach a certain threshold of traffic before you can reliable start testing the ad copy, the offer, funnel, etc.
2 - Where are you sending the ad clicks? If you're just sending them to your website, you might as well just be burning the money to keep warm. Make sure you have a single-purpose landing page where the only goal is to get them to sign up, buy, whatever your goal is. No header; no menu; everything on one fast-loading, minimal-to-no-JS page. You're paying for the traffic, you only care if they convert or not. Convert in this sense might be paying for something, or more likely signing up for an email list or "more information."
The question is who is sending this bot traffic? Fb itself? It's a bit doubtful since all their shenanigans about tracking people and targeting is to improve conversions for their advertisers so they spend more. Also if a software like Darwin can detect and flag bot traffic how come FB can't? What am i missing here?
(1) https://www.indiehackers.com/post/facebook-ads-is-it-all-bot...
Set a specific target URL parameter and check your logs. Depending on your topic, you may see anywhere between 0% and 80% of ad/tracking blockers.
I had an app that would be fun for college students and parties. I printed out some posters with QR codes and placed them around a local campus. One was just a red solo cup with the QR under it - that got the most visits. The app wasn't successful due to marketing and user friendliness/flashiness.
Basically, if your product has a user base that would frequent a physical space, it could be an option to go low-tech with posters/flyers.
If your project is what I think it is (anonymous email), then ads based on user surveillance, like Google and Reddit, probably aren't going to work. Maybe try sponsoring a talk at a security conference or get a billboard on the main commute lines of a tech-heavy neighborhood.
"...Mistakes can also occur in the placement of the "cookie banner": If the cookie banner e.g. covers the link to the imprint, the requirements of the Telemedia Act are not met. According to this, website operators must be identifiable for users. This is not the case if the user cannot reach the imprint directly and constantly, which would be the case with an overlaying cookie banner."
https://www.wolter-musselmann.de/inside/themen/detailansicht...
Generally speaking, advertising is what you do when you have lots of money and not a lot of time or ideas (relative to the returns you're seeking). It's a saturation bombing of marketing tools -- you need to think like a guerilla. IMO, your product is unique enough that it could generate a reasonable amount of traditional press and social media coverage if played right.
If you are selling curtains or soft furnishings your target audience is women and Pinterest is your best channel.
If you are selling dog food and beds your audience is general public with an interest in dogs, facebook is the best channel for general public, find a dog related group or buy and sell group make a post and then pay to promote it.
If you are selling something more business focused like an accounting service then Linkedin is best.
If you are selling something technical like a developer tool then reddit or stackexchange.
My point is that your advertising channel is not determined primary by budget but rather by your target audience and your target audience is determined by your product or service.
Costco Travel is a bigger part of their biz than many folks know...and they have the demographics to support this price point. The letters are charming and their customers have Amazon money with better sensibilities. And alot of them are also small biz owners...not just highly paid employees.
FB ads have improved and are great for some products but generally Adwords is still the performance king. If you've only done FB, consider Adwords.
Reddit is really only good for free promotion. While Im sure it exists, I've need seen positive ROI on paid on the handful of campaigns Ive run there. It can be great for organic type activities: AMA, viral or hail corporate type activity.
Question: How far are you off your target for 'success'? If your way off you need to totally rethink your approach most likely. If your close but not good enough you probably need to refine and get better targeting and user flow.
In other words, generate some clout naturally. When you've got some customers, some reviews on relevant platforms, and things start picking up naturally, keep nurturing that. Add ads as another means of advertising, not your only means.
This is largely Apple's tracking changes. About 60% of the market is iOS.
In today's world with privacy changes and regulations, you're pretty much limited to econometric time series modeling or A/B testing to understand cross platform marketing drivers reliably. That doesn't really work on 15 dollars a day
With that kind of a budget, it's going to be more worthwhile looking at who is your prime prospect, what is the value you're adding to them and the choice of platform and message follows that.
There's no indication of what it is unfortunately in your post.
Paid advertising should only work when you already have data on your LTV, payback and cohorts.
You can literally get hundreds of thousands of impressions by looking at your audience, finding similar attributes and then posting to niche: - Reddits - Facebook groups - Telegram communities etc.
Best thing is, its actually free.
The Tldr; here is that your budget is too low to do anything meaningful on FB.
In the simplest terms, FB traffic is mostly garbage unless you're optimizing for purchases, and those clicks are easily gonna be in the $.5-$1 range these days. It's gotten expensive. If you're getting that many clicks for ~$15, I can tell you're running a Traffic objective and that's just gonna be garbage regardless. l
That said, you're on the right track with the retargeting, but even then, you're not running enough in the first place for retargeting to work. It takes a relatively larger data set.
I wouldn't bother running FB traffic if I can't spend at least $50/day, maybe $100/day.
I realize that most people cannot just throw that kind of money into the pit though.
So, to make this work you need a well planned and executed funnel, product, etc. which is beyond the scope of this discussion, but that's kind of the reality:
Running ads on any platform for $15/day in 2022, is basically worthless. It's sort of a lame reality, but it is what it is really. If you're interested in diving deep into this, I would be happy to help and could point you towards some good resources for learning though.
Also, one last thing:
FB analytics is basically un-trustable garbage and it's know that the data is going to be worthless. All serious media-buyers (people who run ads) use third party tracking software.