Facebook Ads and the Cheapest Clicks on the Planet

As some of you know I like to play around with Facebook Ads. I’m no expert by any means but I do get interesting results and they never cost me a lot of money. Lately I’m seeing my campaigns get better and better so I thought I’d share my findings here and hopefully help a few of you get more return out of your ads.

I first began using Facebook Ads as a means of generating leads for my offline business. My knowledge at the time was pretty basic and was paying anything between €0.70-€1.00 per click, but still I didn’t mind because the ROI was so high for me. Things have moved on quite a bit since then.

I recently ran a campaign which you can see the results of below. My big time budget of €5 gave me a return of 1,265 Page Likes on a brand new page that I just set-up to test the ad.

Let’s have a deeper look at these numbers and see what can we derive from them. Well first of all that’s a lot of Likes for such a small investment. So small that Facebook reports each Cost per Page Like as €0.00 but if we crunch the numbers we can see it cost about €0.003953 per Like.

I had a Click-Through Rate of 0.320% which was okay, but I know with some testing I can get this a lot higher – maybe even near the 1% rate. But the most impressive metric in my opinion are my CPM prices. These are how much I paid for each thousand impressions of my ad. I set my maximum bid at only 3 cents but my campaign cost only 1 cent CPM.

That is the main reason why the clicks were so cheap. I was able to target my niche and really dig down and only advertise to the die-hard fans who I knew would like my page. That’s why it’s important to do proper research before you blow a load of cash of Facebook ads. Spend a little time targeting the right people, the right market and you’ll be able to pay the absolute minimum for your ads.

After looking at this my next question would be what action did these 1,265 Likes take on my Fan Page? Because simpley growing a massive page is only one part of the equation, it’s the actions that happen afterwards that really determine how good your end results from the campaign will be. To begin to answer this let’s take a look at the Actions Report from my Ads Manager in Facebook.

So we can see that the 1,265 Likes actually did result in some good engagement on the page itself. There are lots of Shares, Likes, Comments etc. This bodes well for the future as it shows that people aren’t simply liking a page but are coming back, having a look through the posts and getting involved.

This is very important as it sends positive signals to Facebook and will give future posts more visibility in news feeds of fans. Remember that even if you have a page with 100k fans, at any one time only around 10-15% of them are seeing your posts. The more engagement your page has the more your visibility increases and thus helps your page grow organically. After all Facebook is a giant advertising network and doesn’t want all your fans to see your posts because where is the benefit to them for that to happen? How can they make money from ads in a situation like that?

But by having good engagement on your page with plenty of Likes, Comments, Shares you will maximize the natural reach of your posts and the organic growth of your page will increase.

So what’s next for this page?

Well for the time being I’m going to let the ad run. I’ve set a daily limit of just €1 to keep it growing and I’ll change the ad once the Click-Through Rates begin the fall. After a while ads lose their effectiveness because they have been seen so many times but until that happens I leave it work away on it’s own. So at present with that budget the page is growing my 300 per day. Once it reaches 20k I’ll start monetizing it and build a list that I can email market to.

It’s in a pretty solid niche so I know I’ll have no trouble putting together a 30 day autoresponder series and sit back while it does all the work for me. In the meantime I’ve set-up similar ads in other more mainstream niches and I’m still seeing similar results as to those above.

Overall I think Facebook Ads have proved their worth yet again. I know I’ll continue to learn and improve on what I already know and will post some more case study results here down the line.

If you have any comments or if some of what I’ve said has gone over your head leave your question below and I’ll do my best to answer it!

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