Online advertising

[minestrone]

Interesting stuff. So even if you KNOW your market is virtually 100% men or 100% women you wouldn't restrict on sex? We were perhaps naively thinking why pay to show an advert to someone who is not going to care - although thinking about it that might be more the case with boosting posts to a certain demographic, whereas you're saying ads will automatically target people based on what FB knows about them so we might as well let it do its job?

Oh absolutely. I mean if you had a customer list of 300 names with maybe postcodes, phones and emails and uploaded that to create a custom audience the amount of data they would have on at least 200 them is immense. They will look for similarities on them and extrapolate that custom audience out to build lookalikes that match your customers. If the 300 were women then your probably going to get 90% female lookalikes anyway but overall you can expect that group to be many times more suitable than just shooting off at age and sex. The deep learning in the lookalike building is really powerful.

Part of my job is to take customer lists of 50k and score the customers to pick out maybe 500-1000 of perfect ones to build the perfect seed audience. Which is an ideal job for a judgmental fooker like me.

If you dont have a customer list use page views to build it from engagement, if you dont have that run a "brand awareness" campaign. Build 5 lookalikes from the one custom audience. 0-2,2-4,4-6,6-8,8-10. Then you can stack them up to get a decent audience size after you have set the radius.

Ideally what you want is a website to have a pixel on, then you can run conversion campaigns, with the "learning event" on "page view". Then the advert will just train itself when people hit the site. As conversion campaigns only ever target 25% of the audience you give it so you go broad with maybe 10% lookalike and let the training take care of the rest.

Always a lot of debate about lookalike size...

The $1,500 Facebook Audience Experiment: 1% vs. 5% vs. 10% Lookalike

For a tenner a week you will get 1500 impressions. Now maybe after 26 weeks you dont get one customer which would be highly unlikely, but by that point 10-15k of people in your area now think you are the Don Corleone of child care as they have seen your adverts for 6 months. So it is all about long term brand building on Facebook which is great for business that rely upon trust.

[d000hg]

Interesting stuff. So even if you KNOW your market is virtually 100% men or 100% women you wouldn't restrict on sex? We were perhaps naively thinking why pay to show an advert to someone who is not going to care - although thinking about it that might be more the case with boosting posts to a certain demographic, whereas you're saying ads will automatically target people based on what FB knows about them so we might as well let it do its job?

[minestrone]

You never want to just set up an audience with just age, gender and local. It never works well. The killer feature in Facebook is lookalikes. It will use page engagement, pixel or a customer list and work out other customers for you. Use a 10% then you want to "go broad". 16-50, M&F, 30 miles. If you set the campaign objective to conversion the AI will start to work on who is left, if men dont engage it will just shut them off. Just keep an eye on reach and frequency.

Facebook is better at brand building and developing trust over a longer period. Adwords is "I know you need this now". Twitter is a cesspool.

With Facebook buying WhatsApp and Instagram they have futureproofed the platform. 80% of the population is using it. It's a no brainer to just keep it there.

I'm about to start using taboola though. God knows how that is going to go.

[d000hg]

Build a profile on Insta.
Use lots of hashtags

I think they do that and she does see people interacting with it once they have made initial contact "Susan is liking every single post" is something I hear when I ask "what are all those annoying beeps"

There are a lot of utter tulip Facebook guides on the web which are just clickbait advertising sites.

Yeah my fear exactly. Thanks for the suggestions, will take a look.

Would you say FB alone is reasonable or do we need to get into Google, Twitter and whatever else? Our budget is small and we're very geographically focused - I think the last ad was targeted in a 5 mile radius to women aged 20-35 or something (pre-school mums). So - better not to spread too thin?

I use Google Adwords / Adsense with a monthly fixed budget. In order to be effective with your budget you will have to choose the right words that a customer would most likely to use and choose your target geo location wisely. It's doable, not a rocket science. You will learn it in couple of iterations/weeks.

I read a lot about Google years ago, there was a guy who blogged about his "bingo card" SEO journey. My fear is it's an easy way to sink a lot of cash - and then do we want advertising for people doing searches, or do we want page adverts?

Whatever you do, do not boost posts with Facebook. It simply does not work.

Why do you say that? We've gained a few customers from this.

[courtg9000]

Whatever you do, do not boost posts with Facebook. It simply does not work.

[BigDataPro]

I use Google Adwords / Adsense with a monthly fixed budget. In order to be effective with your budget you will have to choose the right words that a customer would most likely to use and choose your target geo location wisely. It's doable, not a rocket science. You will learn it in couple of iterations/weeks.

[minestrone]

I have a 6 figure facebook ad budget ( and all the fookin grief that goes with it ). But at a small business level you should absolutely get into it, even if it is just 10 quid a week.

Adespresso have a lot of good guides, it is a harness for the ad manager and ive never used it but the facebook guides are good. For books "Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising" by Marshall is one of the better ones. Its crap really, but it covers and reinforces the right way to go about things. There are a lot of utter tulip Facebook guides on the web which are just clickbait advertising sites.

Basically you want to create a custom audience from people that have engaged with your page and create a reach campaign, like 1 ad a week, keep your hot audience onside. Even if the ads are just "what we have been doing this week" story crap.

Then create a 10% lookalike from the custom audience and run conversion/lead gen campaigns from that for new customers. Advertise in a radius of your business. Use Facebook lead forms and use offers. When people engaged with the advert ( even if they dont follow through on the objective ) they then go into the first audience and get retargeted.

Creative is 90% of facebook, need to AB test constantly, even subtle wording changes make big differences. Images. CTAs, headlines, primary text, descriptions.

Facebook is a cargo cult platform, you do things until something works, but dont make the mistake of thinking the last change before it worked was the cause of it working. tulip just works or doesn't work without any logical reason mostly and you never know why.


Edit:
Facebook & Google Ads Guides by AdEspresso

[saptastic]

Anyone got experience with online advertising for their small business or maybe a spouse, family member?

Mrs d. Is so far using Facebook alone for her local child care business. It seems a good option to me due to local community focus but this is new to both of us, and advertising is full of snake oil which makes me wary just googling for some articles, so any recommendations on good self learning resources are very welcome.

Ta.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6003 using Tapatalk

Build a profile on Insta.
Use lots of hashtags

[d000hg]

Anyone got experience with online advertising for their small business or maybe a spouse, family member?

Mrs d. Is so far using Facebook alone for her local child care business. It seems a good option to me due to local community focus but this is new to both of us, and advertising is full of snake oil which makes me wary just googling for some articles, so any recommendations on good self learning resources are very welcome.

Ta.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6003 using Tapatalk