Portfolio Spreadsheets

The first Facebook advertisement was created from a quick link provided by FB.

SETUP - Ad #1 I chose to optimize for link clicks to my site https://www.portfoliospreadsheets.com and a daily budget of US$2.00.

It allowed choosing the targeted geographic locations, gender, and age range.

I chose Men and Women, aged 25-50 in Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, , Belgium, Russia, Iceland, Lithuania, France, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Italy, Portugal, and India.

These countries were the non-US/Canada/UK ones that supported realtime stock quotes from Google Finance.

The ad text was, “Your stock portfolio performance at a glance. Global markets supported. Track your capital gains. Account for cash and dividends. 10 portfolios for $5 per month. Try for free.” It had a simple logo image with part of a newspaper image.

I stopped the ad after about 6 hours.

RESULT - Ad #1 It cost about $1.00. I reached about 1400 people. 6 clicked the link. 2 liked the link. Cost per Link Click = 100/6 = 17 cents. 100% of the ads were located in India.

CONCLUSIONS - Ad #1 If you optimize for link clicks, FB tries to maximize impressions. In doing so, it targets the most inexpensive country to advertise in.

SETUP - Ad #2 I found a different FB link to create an ad that lets you choose an Audience and Placement. For the audience I chose people with the interest ‘Value Investing’. For placement I chose not to run Messenger or Instagram ads. The budget is $2.00 per day and it will run for one day.

For the other targeting parameters I chose Men and Women, aged 25 to 55, in India. It had the text, “Your stock portfolio performance at a glance. Bombay Stock Exchange supported.” Followed by an image of a spreadsheet.

I report the results after 12 hours below. The ad is still running after some modifications.

RESULT - Ad #2 For $0.48, I got 946 impressions and 18 clicks making it 3 cents per click. All but one ad placement was on the Mobile News Feed.

CONCLUSIONS - Ad #2 Indians are quite willing to click. However, my SaaS works best on the desktop so I need to target desktop only. I found how to change that easily using the iOS Facebook Ads app.

SETUP - Ad #3 Ad #3 was run in parallel with Ad #2.

Audience was set to the interests ‘Value Investing’ and added ‘Warren Buffet’ because somehow FB said the audience was too small for an ad. The budget was set to $2.00 per day and set to run for one day.

Placement was on Mobile and Desktop News Feeds.

I chose Men and Women, aged 25-50 in Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, , Belgium, Russia, Iceland, Lithuania, France, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Italy, and Portugal. (I excluded India.)

The text and image were the same as Ad #2 except it said “European stocks supported.” instead of “Bombay Stock Exchange supported.”

I report the result after about 12 hours of running the ad. The ad is still running after some modifications.

RESULT - Ad #3 For $0.54 I got 218 impressions and 2 clicks from making the cost per click 27 cents. All the ads were placed on the Mobile News Feed. Various regions were placed with ads. I haven’t found a report that neatly organizes by country but Italy, Belgium, and Portugal seem to have the most placed ads.

CONCLUSIONS - Ad #3 The EU is more expensive to target leading to lower impressions and higher cost per click.

FINAL THOUGHTS So far there have been no conversions. My landing page asks visitors to signup to beta test the service. 20-something visits is not enough to draw conclusions about the conversion rate.

Also, it’s useful to add something like /?ref=fb_eu to the end of the URL supplied to Facebook to track clicks yourself. However, something is hitting these links (maybe the CDN), and Facebook itself will test the link. Facebook is easy to detect in the logs because it has an IPv6 address with ‘face:b00c’ in it.

After some practical experience with Facebook Ads, I may start a Udemy course on Facebook advertising.

Thanks for reading! Any advice (landing page, advertising) would be appreciated.

... and we discover it's not easy to recruit users.

Our company was registered today in Hong Kong.

It's a quick and easy process. You just need one director/shareholder who doesn't need to be a citizen of HK. However, a local will need to serve as Company Secretary. Various agencies will do this for you.

A typical package costs about US$1500 and includes a company secretary and physical address for one year.

After one year, you will need accounting/audit which can cost US$1000 upwards, plus another year of Legal Maintenance/Company Secretary which is about US$1000.

The company tax rate is 8.25% for under HKD$2M of profits, and 16.5% thereafter.