Any advice for lowering costs on facebook?

I'm actually surprised your ad was approved...

Giving specifics like "3 minutes" makes Facebook assume you're making unrealistic claims.

How many ad campaigns have you run? Have you tried any with a different image, besides that of a pill bottle?

I guess it all boils down to choosing the correct keywords if you're doing PPC with FB.

I personally prefer free traffic from facebook since they are excellent at that! Perhaps try it out with a Fan page, an event. I recently saw a diet event on facebook that went viral. They had millions of invites!

Anyone else have any thoughts on Facebook?

In my experience CPC is completely controlled by the CTR. All of my latest campaigns have started between $.80 and $1.20 and within less than an hour worked their way down to $.20 and all the way down to my current campaigns running at $.02.

Facebook is a social platform, so it is about building the community. It is kind of like what Perry and Ryan talk about with "Inviting Them To The Party" My campaigns are running to a fan page, and 8% of the people that become a fan join our email list. BTW, 73% of the people that click on the ad become fans. Once they become fans, I have the ability to engage them a little more and take them to different sites/videos that further enhance the connection. This may not be covered in Facebook Ad Power which I think is what you have.

Look on Facebook for other diet fan pages that have over 50,000 fans. I was about to mention one, but I think they would track me down and kill my cat or something. Take a close look at what they are doing and look at the fan participation. You should find banners on the left column with calls of action to the website or call toll free to order the product. These are being built with PPC marketing on Facebook to get the fan base. Stop selling and start connecting. Applying Google PPC copy to Facebook doesn't really work.

That is my opinion, I am sure there are others out there, but that is what I am experiencing today on Facebook and how I am using it successfully.

I run ads at $10 a day and gain 400-500 fans and about 30 optins on average to our newsletter for an ecommerce site.

HTH,
Kevin

This video may help with the party analogy I mentioned:

NOTE: In order for the audio an video to match, you need
to switch the playback to 480p on the lower right of the video
player.


Thanks,
Kevin

Hey Richnana, Kevin really hit the nail on the head, wow! I've sold a pretty powerful, high converting offer on face book and it worked... for a while... then it stopped working. My site converted really well, after I got my ads approved that is ;-) but people get tired of seeing the same ad so you have to switch it up. BUT Kevin is right... they really don't like to be sold too. Maybe use his idea and create a fan page to cultivate a relationship. That will definitely be my next step. I also might try just going for opt-ins instead of sending them straight to the sales page. Maybe split test those against each other. Usually, the less steps to the end result the better.... in this case, you have to join the "party" .

A couple other notes I thought of during dinner.

1) test your ads with a segmented market first before unleashing the masses. During initial tests, I look for a targeted segment of 8,000 to 15,000 facebook users. This could be segmentation by age, or depending on the market, geo targeting. You can use Google Insights with your primary keyword to identify the top 10 States for that search term and target that segment.

2) From my experience, here is what I found .1% CTR gets you in the $0.20 to $0.25 a click, .2% gets you in the $0.10 to $0.15 a click and the .3% CTR gets you in the $.05 CPC. My current ad is running at about .48% CTR and average $0.02 CPC.

3) We are incentivizing (Is that a word?) fans with discounts to our ecommerce store with a 10% discount. Free downloads/reports work as well, but money talks baby.

4) On the ad side, based on my testing a landscape image that fills the ad left to right works better than the standard portrait snapshot of your fan page image that is put in by default. This double my CTR and Actions/Conversions. Also keep in mind that while an image of a person may pull in more people, the image can be used for additional ad copy that is sexier than the ugly text in the rest of the ad.

5) We also mention the fan page sponsor domain in the ad, so that domain is being shown on Facebook 200,000+ times a day whether people click on the ad or not. The logo for the site is also at the bottom of the fan page image on the left side of the fan page. We have seen an increase of typed in traffic and search traffic searching for the domain name since we started advertising on Facebook.

I appreciate all the kind words from everyone, hopefully I am not giving away the farm. It is a huge playground, so plenty of room for everyone. Because of the social nature of facebook, bullies will be punished quickly by the angry mob ;-)

Kevin

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone for the feedback. I am going to be thoroughly going through all your responses today and applying everything I can. I will post back with any thoughts or results.


- Ryan

Hi Ryan,

For the most part, Facebook PPS manages itself, as long as the CTR holds. Some say to make your initial bid half of what they estimate, but I have been starting new campaigns at the bottom of the suggested price, and if they get a CTR of 0.1% or better the bidding automatically adjusts down.

Once I run a test campaign for a day, and I can see what my CTR is and the new suggested bid they are giving, I will ratchet it down a bit just in case something weird happens but so far it hasn't.

As an example, right now my clicks are still costing me $0.02 but my bid is $0.07

This campaign started initially at about $0.65 but very very quickly automatically adjusted down to less than $0.10 once Facebook new how the performance was. I also believe that I get a lower cost per click by driving the traffic to a fan page rather than outside of Facebook. They are still going to a custom tab on the fan page, so I minimize the distractions as much as possible. You can change the bid anytime you want, as long as it is in their suggested bid range, they will give you traffic. Below suggested, they will give you traffic, but it will be sporatic and eventually go away for weeks at a time.

As long as you don't change the targeting, image or copy, you can turn the ad on and off as many times as you want. If you change anything besides budget or bidding it goes back through manual review.


Kevin

Hi Kevin,

Does your course go into all your knowledge on Facebook advertising? I have only used FB ads briefly but my CTR wasn't anywhere near your impressive rates. The description of your WSO seems to not include Facebook advertising so wanted to clarify.

Thanks,
Dale.
Join our fan page in relation to Champagne:
Champagne Lovers : Bringing you select French Champagne online in Australia | Facebook



.

Hi Dale,

I did a presentation earlier this month that picked apart the top fan pages, and what they were doing and how I would do it from a technical perspective. I will be adding that, and then August 5th is my next presentation, and that will be going through the complete case study of how we built 4,000+ fans on our community fan page for our ecommerce store.

We are going to be spending a lot of time improving the fan page generator as well. A lot of what is going in to that is what we are using internally as well for customers and is being built to simplify our internal processes so our VAs can easily build fan pages as well.

So, short answer, it does right now but if that is what everyone is interested in I am willing to record a video and add it. I will be including the video from my July and August
presentations.

Thanks,
Kevin

Dale,

BTW, just checked out your fan page, and yes it would probably be a really good fit since you are launching an ecommerce store along with the fan page.

Kevin

Thanks for the answers Kevin.

Yes a seminar on how to get higher CTR and cheaper ad prices would be great.

Have now bought your WSO and look forward to the improvements coming in August.

Dale.
Join our Facebook fan page re Champagne:
Champagne Lovers : Bringing you select French Champagne online in Australia | Facebook


.

From my experience with Facebook advertising I wouldn't bother trying to get the price down as I would be walking away from it. It seems that the only person who makes money from facebook advertising is facebook.

Think about it when you are keeping in touch with friends and family do you want to be bugged with advertising. It's like catching up with a friend in the coffee shop and having a salesman butting in all the time. There is a time and place and for me it isn't facebook.

Toots,

The biggest lesson I have learned in marketing, is not to judge what my prospect will do based on what I would do.

3133 people in the last two weeks thought completely the opposite of you and click on my ad. According to Facebook 2156 of those became fans. Of those, over 300 joined our email list for monthly discounts to our ecommerce store. and 4 have already used the discount code including an order for over $120. Our ad spend was $78.53, so it was already profitable for us to simply build our list at more than 10 times the rate we were before from just our website traffic.

It may not work for you and the business you have. I know I have tried it in the past and thought it was a waste of time too. The turning point for me was an ad campaign that finally worked for a clickbank affiliate product, and then the second Aha came from studying how some of the top fan pages are being monetized. If you want to build a large fan base, Facebook Advertising is how it is done.

It it doesn't work for you, I understand.

Kevin