One of my readers suggested it would be helpful if I gave regular progress reports, with screenshots, on how this case study is progressing. That sounds like a good idea to me as well, since it will help me track things better.
So, this week I’ve been running both Facebook ads ($3/day) and Adwords ads ($7/day). The site gets very little traffic organically yet (it’s only a month old), so nearly all the traffic is coming either from Facebook or Google. I have two main goals: boost my Facebook audience (people who “like” my page) and increase my list of email subscribers.
So how did things go this week?
Facebook subscribers: 951
I’ve been getting about 10-15 new “likes” a day due to my Facebook ad campaign.
Aweber List Subscribers: 21
Most days this week I’ve been getting just two or three subscribers a day. Most of my subscribers appear to be coming from Facebook.
Yesterday I tried a new strategy of reminding my Facebook subscribers to subscribe to my email list. That boosted my subscriber base up a bit for the day (five for the day).
Traffic
I saw a big surge in traffic this week once I changed my Facebook ads to be more like what is recommended by Amy Porterfield in FBInfluence:
As you can see, I’m now averaging around 150 visitors daily. Many visitors visit multiple pages, so my overall page visits are usually over 300/day.
Earnings
Please excuse the big black box! Overall, for this site’s Amazon tracking ID, I had 579 clicks this week. I assume many of these are free downloads, but I also had 57 purchases. Total earnings for the week = $17.28 (or $2.49/day).
Although the earnings are not much, it is boosting my commission rate for my other Amazon sites to the 7% level for the first time since last December!
Facebook Ad Performance
Being new to the PPC game, I don’t have much to compare my campaigns performance to, but I have been looking at what some others say is a good rate for Facebook ads CTR rates. Here is my current Facebook ad’s performance for this week (spending = approx. $3/day).
The CTR seemed very low to me, but after doing some research online, this ad actually seems to be performing above average. According to one expert, anything between .11 and .16% is considered “optimal” for Facebook ads:
Adwords Ads
I’ve been spending $7/day on Adwords ads. My site’s “quality score” tends to be around 5 or 6 for most of the ads I’m targeting – so not great, but not horrible either (I guess?).
Here are the results for this week:
As you can see, my CTR is nearly 3%. Is that a good rate? Well, according to Google Adwords Help (reported by seroundtable.com), 2% is the average CTR for adwords ads, so I’m a bit above average. I’m sure this campaign could be tweaked, however, and have even better performance.
Plans for the upcoming week:
I’m going to continue running these ads this week – Facebook at $3/day (my Facebook credit has now run out, so this will come out of my pocket) and Adwords at $5 day (until my $100 credit runs out). I am going to also try testing CPC versus CPM ads at Facebook, to see which performs best for me.
I’m still feeling a bit bewildered – I don’t know if I should be really happy with these results or not, but I’ll continue reading stuff online about PPC marketing and try to understand things better. Comments from you all are welcome as well, especially if you have experience in this field.
What do you think about these results? What would you do?
Hi Michelle. Quick question, when people click your ads do they go directly to your site? Or do they instead go to your Facebook page, you encourage them to like it then go onto your site? thanks for clearing this up.
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Michelle Reply:
September 24th, 2012 at 3:40 pm
Good question, Shaun. When they click on my facebook ad (they can also just “like” it), they go to my aweber opt-in page on Facebook. (I’ve named it my “welcome” page).
With the Adwords ads, they go directly to my site. Hope that helps!
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Nice! You bought Amy’s course – I’ve been wanting that one myself for a while but never got around to it. Pretty cool to see you diving into PPC. I’ve heard that depending on the offer, though, PPC traffic has to be really monitored for conversions. Have you set up conversion tracking?
Would be interested in how those tests and data come out, but bottom line: if you get more leads and sales, you know it’s working.
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[Reply]
Michelle Reply:
September 24th, 2012 at 5:50 pm
Thanks for your comments James. Um, conversion tracking, no… Googling to see what that is now. I see, apparently involves installing a html snippet on my site.
Clearly I’m a complete noob. Amy’s guide was actually really good for the Facebook side of things, but I clearly need some help understanding how to run an Adwords campaign!
[Reply]
Michelle Reply:
September 24th, 2012 at 5:51 pm
p.s. Thanks for the tip – conversion tracking looks pretty important!
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