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Paying for Facebook ads; is it worth it?
By
Chris Muench
July 10, 2018
Is paying for Facebook ads worth it? Does anyone have any tips or targeting and writing good ads?
Before any paid ads you need to clearly understand your audience and their needs. Otherwise you'll simply throw it all away.
Try to start with personal sales, find the right message and the real pain points. After that, when you'll find narrow audience and their real problems, make sure that there's existing demand for that. If you have to educate your customers then consider content marketing instead
This is very sound advice!
In the past three months, I've been tempted to buy some FB ads for my project (www.tribefive.me for reference). However after reading advice like this (and others from fellow Indie Hackers), I took the disciplined and hard approach to reach out 1:1 with potential customers. And from that, I was really able to find the right message and learn about their pain points.
I have no idea how I would have gathered those learnings through a FB ad...
In most cases - it is worth it.
I'm optimizing campaigns with budgets over 100k$/month now for different clients, and if you got a good strategy and right product/service for FB the ROI can be waaay better than from any other form of advertising.
Tips?
A/B testing EVERYTHING! All the time. Audiences. Bids. Copy. Images. Formats.
Think different - don't be affraid to testing new things, connecting ads with Messenger (and bots) etc, etc. It changes very quickly, but this is a good think. You can gain an advantage if you can use it.
Use custom audiences and remarketing to build great sales funnel.
Don't forget about great landing page. I think @MeansNoWaaris can review it now for free for you. ;)
Thanks for the shoutout @Matt_Growth_Hacker. Really appreciate it. Who'd have thunk that a techie who likes writing can make a niche for themselves :)!
@blasto333, I was giving home page feedback a couple of days ago but that thread is closed. If you're still looking for feedback or will, in future, want real time feedback, Second Look has a crowdsourced forum where you can get feedback from me (and hopefully others).
Doing all that work is a no brainer when running $100k/month campaigns, but what if we're spending much much less? we can't spend additional thousands of dollars A/B testing everything and fine tuning everything, trying lots of copy, images and so on.
So, in this situation, is it worth it? does it need a ton of babysitting? will an average half-assed campaign have a good ROI?
Sure, if you're running a small campaign it's still worth it. You don't have to check it everyday if your budget is few hundreds a month. The worst case scenario is you lose few bucks ;).
But even in small scall and growth hacking mindset you can figure out how to win customers cheaply. ;)
We have clients who started with the budget like ~1000$/month so it's possible to build a great sales funnel with small budget. PPC is a scalable channel, so you can start small.
Also with low budget you need to test only few things at the time to get measurable data, so it's not that time consuming. ;)
PS: Let me know if you're running a campaign right now - I'll try to help you identify what you should optimize. ;)
Thank you, Matt! We're not running a FB campaign right now, just AdWords. I've been wanting to set up FB for some time, I was thinking of just using the same copy as several of our best AdWords ads, then play with targeting.
Alvaro don't do this! AdWords and Facebook are very different. Same copy for both isn't a good idea. :)
Furthermore try to create few adgroups for few diffferent audiences with different copy for each of them. :)
All depends on your market, but they can be quite effective if you have your product messaging dialed in. Don't expect to just throw up ads though. Latest tactic is to run ads to content then use retargeting to get the initial opt in. It takes a lot of work. Check out the Art of Paid Traffic podcast for some good tactical content and consider picking up a course from digitalmarketer.com.
it is absolutely worth it! It's infact better at targeting audience and ROI compared to google. We have had so much luck with facebook ads and LinkedIn as well. CAC was $400 in adwords and $40 in facebook.
Good question, related to this is there any SASS that can help with this? Eg you could spend 1/2 your day analysing data and a/b testing but you would rather be spending that time on your product. I would have more chance of being able to afford to pay for this service rather than hiring a full time marketing executive.
with great targeting power comes great responsibility. Facebook ads are far from beginner-friendly, and the huge range of ad options make it tough for newbies to get started. To some extent, you just have to dive in and get your feet wet.
Just remember to follow the tips below:
If you're starting out you should throw $100 on some FB super tailored ads, super well specified demographic and audience with extremely aggressive graphics and copy and see what happens.
Remember to test different "scenarios" and create a landing page for each. See where in your funnel people stop clicking before getting to your goal page and re-iterate from that. That's the best way to test out your overall product and ad-strategy IMHO