Aug 17
After doing some research into a few methods of advertisement (magazine, website, movie theater slides) I decided to suck it up and buy ad-space on Facebook. I put together a tiny, simple add (complete with our new logo!) and then targeted to males on facebook, aged 15 and over with any one of maybe twelve different keywords in their profiles. I am paying for this all out of my own pocket so I went really conservative, maxing my daily ad-expense to only $15 using a CPC (cost-per-click) payment plan with a maximum bid of $0.70.
Does anyone have experience with this? Do my numbers seem completely unreasonable?
Facebook uses an auction system to determine which ads get displayed on their pages, and in general the more you are willing to pay, the more likely your ad is to be displayed. On certain pages at certain times of the day the winning bid may be very low, at other times it may be very high. Facebook’s system starts low and goes from there, so even though my max bid is $0.70 I have found that I will often win the auction with a bid of only $0.50-$0.60. However, since they take care of the bidding for me, my only concern is in setting a maximum at which point I am no longer willing to pay. It is a pretty nifty system, although the exact details of the process are unknown to me (and maybe proprietary?). Anyways, I came up with a $0.70 max bid and a $15.00 daily limit. That works out to about $100 per week; a reasonable price for an advertising trial over the next few weeks.
** Oh, for those of you who offered suggestions on ad techniques, a single quarter-page ad in CardPlayer Magazine costs $2,500. A full page ad costs $25,000. A side-banner ad on cardplayer.com costs $24,000. Not that they would ever allow a third-party ad like ours, but NFL.com gets 35x the traffic as cardplayer. I didn’t even bother looking up their ad rates. There’s a reason why the only ads you typically see are Budweiser or Toyota, not Giuseppe’s Salami Shoppe.
So far, in only one day of the advertisement campaign, our site’s ad has been displayed 89,325 times. It has been clicked (the user taken directly to our website) 30 times at an average cost of $0.60 per click. I know that 30 clicks per 89,000 impressions doesn’t sound very good, but both numbers make me happy. Yesterday those numbers were zero and zero. Plus, I’m only paying for the 30 and not the 89,000.
Our conversion rate on the site is still not very good (although conversion rates are probably extremely low anyways: my guess is about 1-3 percent?), but we have been hard at work addressing that issue. I reworked the landing page a bit and made major changes to the amount of “free” content that our site offers. Previously we were displaying Top-10 lists for every positional category, originally intended as a courtesy to help demonstrate our wealth of information. However, I am concerned that by displaying so much information for free we are decreasing the apparent need to register. Why even bother signing up when you can see 10 different positional top-10 lists without paying for it? I also hid our article library from the public, allowing them only to see the titles and intros to the most recent three articles. Visitors will be able to see a listing of our article categories – a symbol of the greater wealth of content within – but will no longer be able to peruse our entire library without a subscription.
Anyways, with a combination of Facebook’s ad campaign manager and Google Analytics we are keeping close watch over the number of visitors we get, how they find us, which of our pages they visit, how much time they spend on each page, etc… and over the next few days we will hopefully continue to refine our website and marketing to be more and more efficient.
Thanks again to everyone who continues to support us, whether you are subscribers or not… keep spreading the word! If you have any suggestions about ways to make our site more appealing to our visitors and help make them want to subscribe, I would love you forever and ever.