How I Drove 24,747 Facebook Likes At $0.04 Each

I recently ran a Facebook campaign for PPC Ian with the goal of expanding my audience of readers. What started out as a small test turned into a large campaign driving 24,747 incremental page likes for only $1,001.70 (or $0.04 per like). Today, I’m thrilled to share insights from my campaign and also screenshots from my Facebook Advertising account.

Facebook Advertising Insight 1: Always Test

My advertising budget for PPC Ian is really low. That said, I always try to dabble in campaigns of all sorts. It’s this moonlighting and experimenting on my personal blog that expands the knowledge and results I can drive as an overall marketer. If you have a day job in digital marketing, you absolutely need to be experimenting on your own as well. Think of it as an investment in yourself. This is money well spent!

Facebook Advertising Insight 2: Have An Adaptive Budget Philosophy

When I started this campaign, I had allocated a low budget. I don’t recall exactly, but it was probably no more than $10 or $20 per day, with the goal of running for a week. The same day I launched, I quickly noticed that my campaign was driving one of the best cost-per-likes I have experienced. I started raising budgets in increments, observing my cost-per-like carefully. I noticed that it did not increase, in fact it appeared to decrease! I had certainly crafted a scalable campaign, one worthy of investment. I adapted to the market conditions and doubled down on my investment.

Facebook Advertising Insight 3: Experiment With Non-Standard Audiences

I thought I knew my audience fairly well. PPC Ian is targeted towards digital marketing professionals. Most of my readers are US-based, typically in their 20s and 30s, building fast-paced careers.

When running this campaign, I expanded my target audience to include anyone over the age of 18, and also included a bunch of tech-savvy countries such as India. I was delightfully surprised to discover that the PPC Ian target audience is truly global, and can skew younger/male. I’m impressed that younger generations are building digital marketing careers internationally, as they are surely setting themselves up for success in life! I feel like I tapped into a truly responsive audience by challenging my tried-and-true marketing filters.

Insight 4: It’s All About Mobile

If you have been advertising in social media for a while, you probably already know this one. Social media is a truly personal, mobile experience. It seems to be even more so with the international professional. This campaign drove most of its success from mobile devices.

Insight 5: It’s OK To Take Pause

$1,001.70 is a big budget for me! This is my personal blog, after all. As you can see in the first screenshot (top of this blog post), I paused my campaign a few times. I actually reduced my daily budget to $1 and then paused to be extra safe I wouldn’t spend more money. I wanted to test my Facebook page to make sure my new fans were legit and responsive to my social media updates.

I was pleased to find that my new fans were very responsive, I was affordably building a new source of traffic to the PPC Ian brand. Upon un-pausing and raising my budgets, I watched my cost-per-like closely. I found that pausing my campaign did not hurt my results. I was able to continue with a similar cost-per-like and did not hurt my results by pausing. Lesson: Don’t be scared to take pause.

Insight 6: Pictures of Me Speaking Work Well

If you’ve been in digital marketing for a while, you know that creative is one of the most important elements of any successful campaign. I didn’t test multiple creative in this campaign, but I did at least discover a winning creative. I featured a picture of myself speaking publicly at Programmatic I/O, and encouraged those viewing my ad to contact me with any question. I’m always here to help. Based upon the success of this creative, I’m now rolling similar creative out to my PPC Ian retargeting campaigns.

Insight 7: Be Scrappy and Leverage Pockets of Downtime

I don’t have a ton of free time. That said, I live a no excuses lifestyle. I actually launched this campaign on my mobile smartphone while at a family get-together. I had a few minutes of downtime, and just went for it. Even if you’re not in front of your computer, always test. Leverage those small chunks of downtime to launch campaigns. There are no excuses if you have true dedication to digital marketing.

Insight 8: $0.04 Likes Are Possible At Scale

I used to think that $0.30 per like was reasonably good. This campaign certainly challenged my thinking. $0.04 is now going to be the golden benchmark to beat. The moral: Always optimize and challenge yourself for increased efficiency.

I hope these tips help and my sincere thank you to all of my new readers!

Surpassing 3,000 Fans on Facebook Via Paid Traffic

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jul 3 10

Just a few weeks back, I wrote a post about how I Got 1,242 Facebook Fans for Only $347.70. The post became really popular, got some great comments (thank you to all who commented), and inspired me to push my campaign even further, much further!

Today, I’m thrilled to announce that I drove a total of 3,156 likes! (This is not the PPC Ian Facebook Fan Page, but is a Fan Page for another one of my authority sites.) Out of my 3,156 likes, 2,938 are from my paid campaign. Since I paid $965.42, but got a $50 coupon thanks to my wife, I ended paying $915.42 or $0.31 per paid like. Not bad, and very consistent with my results last time. Today, I wanted to close out my test by sharing a few thoughts (while hopefully inspiring you to run your own Facebook paid like campaign)!

75 Wall Posts or Comments Within 1 Week

Paid likes are some of the highest quality Facebook Fans around! Just check out the image above. Over the past week, there have been 75 wall posts or comments. The majority of these have been fans commenting on my wall posts, fans posting their own questions, or fans liking wall posts. For only $915.42, I created a vibrant community that is sharing my content and driving traffic to my site. Paid likes are of really high quality (just like paid search traffic from search engines).

Facebook Fan Page = PPC (Except You Pay 1st)

I’m viewing social media, especially Facebook, in a new light. I’m a paid search guy and am used to paying per click as I go. Facebook is the same thing, but you pay first! Think of it this way: You pay/invest a lot of money, drive paid likes, leverage those likes to drive interaction on your page, and then get visits from your fans over time.

It’s estimated that Each Facebook Fan Will Drive 20 Visits To Your Website. $0.31 (my price per fan) for 20 visits is really great, that’s only $0.016 per visit (certainly cheaper than AdWords or adCenter). Even better, this doesn’t even take into account the branding and SEO advantages of having a vibrant social media program. Looking at things in this light puts a whole new spin on Facebook and is a great way to pitch the idea of increased social media budget to your organization.

Watch Out For New Account Limits

When you open a new Facebook Ads account, Facebook will throttle you. In my last post, I mentioned how my impressions were throttled and then I got a surge of traffic all of the sudden at the end of the test. I originally thought this was due to Facebook fighting ad fatigue and evening the impressions over time. I was wrong. It’s because Facebook put a $50/day budget limit on my account but then lifted the limit to $200 once a number of successful credit card charges went through. Just something to be aware of when you open a new account.

My Self-Sustaining Community

If you drive enough likes, you can create a self-sustaining community on Facebook. My interaction with my Fan Page in this case study has not been very extensive at all. Fans have actually been asking other fans questions. The community is vibrant and self-sustaining to a degree which is super cool! I just need to keep an eye out for community members posting their own links. I’ve had to remove a few, but other than that the comments and interaction has been super genuine. Of course, I do expect this interaction to decline over time as the hype and freshness of my page wears off. It will be at that point that I jump in with some clever ideas and/or run another like campaign.

So there you have it! Now, my campaign is paused as I didn’t want to go over $1,000 total media spend for this initial test. What are your thoughts on paid Facebook like campaigns? At $0.31/fan, should I keep running this program until the price per fan starts going up? I’m certainly tempted!

How I Got 1,242 Facebook Fans For Only $347.70

By PPC Ian Leave a Comment Jun 17 13

I’m a huge fan of Facebook advertising, especially when my goal is driving fans. I currently have three Facebook Fan Pages: my PPC Ian Fan Page (please like me, I would truly appreciate it) and two others for my top two authority sites. The main goal of my Facebook Fan Page strategy? Drive repeat visitors to my sites, communicate with my top visitors (people who can be evangelists for my brands), and of course create SEO value (social media is driving SEO and will only continue to do so more, in my opinion). I’ve had a lot of success with my newest Facebook Fan Page. I basically went from 0 fans to 1,242 in less than a week for only $347.70. That’s only $0.28 per fan! (Make sure to check out the screenshot from my Facebook account at the bottom of this post.) These are real fans, fans who are interacting with my page, fans who are helping me build my business. I feel that this point is absolutely critical because I can get 1,242 fans for cheap on Fiverr but those wouldn’t be real, quality fans the way you can drive with a paid campaign. Today I’m excited to share my strategy!

Step 1: Leverage The $50 Coupon

First and foremost, it always pays to have a coupon. My wife found one for me in the recent issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. I put it to good use immediately and this lowered the cost basis of my campaign. If you don’t have a Facebook advertising account yet, make sure to leverage this coupon or another one when you open your new account. Even if you don’t have money to spend on your Facebook Fan Page, at least the coupon will give you $50 in free spend.

Step 2: Write Great Creative

I’m sure you’ve heard this hundreds of times, but I truly can’t underscore the importance of testing creative (both text and images). Just check out the screenshot below. The second ad is the clear winner with a CTR of 0.217%. The other ads have CTRs of 0.126% and 0.080%. What’s really crazy here is I didn’t vary my text too much. I already have a winning model that starts with "Poll" and then asks a simple question. If the answer is "yes", I ask the user to click "Like". This copy has worked really well and I encourage you to try it out. Amongst the three ads, I really did vary the images. The winning image actually surprised me, it’s hard to predict the winner so I always recommend testing!

Step 3: Give Your Facebook Campaign Time

I put a budget of $250/day on this campaign from the start. It made perfect sense, I was targeting a huge audience of around 300,000 reach. However, Facebook really surprised me this time! It seems that they throttled my campaign. Despite having a good CTR and low CPC, I didn’t hit my daily budget. The frequency is lower than I’ve seen in the past and it took many days (almost a week) to hit just half of my target audience.

I almost prefer it this way. I was able to run my campaign for about a week and I’m seeing no signs of burnout yet! I’m still running it now and perhaps the Facebook Ads team is working on the burnout problem. The moral here: We don’t appear to be in a churn and burn environment right now. I used to run Facebook campaigns that would experience ad fatigue within 24-48 hours. I’m not seeing that with my most recent campaign and recommend stretching your time horizon out a bit.

My Typical Experience With Paid Facebook Like Campaigns

Over the last year or so, I’ve run a multitude of Facebook "Like" campaigns (paid campaigns with the goal of driving likes). I’ve seen truly varied results. Some verticals, despite my best efforts, come in at a lofty $5/like. In a more typical situation, I have seen likes between $1 and $2 each. For the reasons outlined in the introduction, I can’t imagine running an authority site without at least a few hundred real, dedicated likes so I’m happy to pay the price even if it is in the $1-$2/like range.

I’m truly thrilled with this campaign, however, because I’m coming in at $0.28 per like. I spent $397.70 so far, but I got that great $50 coupon so I actually only spent $347.70. $347.70 divided by 1,242 fans is a sweet $0.28 per fan. Knowing how well my website converts and the value of these fans, I will keep running this campaign until it experiences fatigue. I expect that to happen after I hit 2,000 fans since at that point I will have hit the majority of my target audience and the ad frequency should get up to the 10+ range.

I truly hope this helps you out not only with the strategy but also with some numbers so you know what to expect. Want to learn more about driving fans on Facebook? I highly recommend my post about Three Ways To Drive More Facebook Fans. Also, Acquisio’s free Facebook Webinar is truly awesome. What has been your experience? Anyone driven fans via paid Facebook campaigns for less than $0.28/fan?