Effective Use Of Fb Paid Ads

In advertising I believe one can do the shotgun approach with greater success if you are advertising products that almost everyone uses and reuses (cars, furniture, cleaning supplies, utilitarian things). Art, prints, framing and the like are sadly not viewed as such a product. Everyone wants and believes exposure is good for artists but the reality is that sales will come from a very small percentage of the population and often it's an occasional purchase to decorate a wall. If FB filtered the advertising to those known to buy art, prints, framing, that might be a game changer.

I have been in many homes with no art on the walls. At best they have a family photo framed at Walmart. A family just trying to stay in the middle class is a poor prospect. Advertising to that household is almost tossing money out the window. Obviously upper income is a good filter but even that is only part of the puzzle.

It's called cold advertising. Doesn't work. Mr Z is wealthy enough 😉

If you have a personal website, and a Business FB page, you can grab the code for Facebook Pixels and copy/paste that code to your website's HTML.

Allows you to see who visited YOUR website and your ads on your business page will be shown as "suggested for you" in their FB feed.

This works better because now they've already visited your WEBSITE, familiar your brand, and are far more likely to take you up on an offer or sign up for a newsletter

FAA doesn't provide access to HTML, robots.txt or other CP control, so it's best used for a WordPress site or much more upscale platform website

If anyone is interested please do yourselves the favor of Google searching: Facebook Pixels.
Setting up a business page on FB to employ the tools Facebook provides is a little complicated but worthwhile.

If your personal website gets 250 monthly hits, perhaps 200 are FB users. After 4 months that's 800 FB users that have visited your website and are now targeted for a nicely worded FB ad. Keep in mind this is not a technique to acquire likes or followers! The FB Pixels code that you copy/paste to your HTML on your personal site tracks visitors TO your site and recognizes them as FB users, or not.When you place a legit post to your FB business page, it gets suggested to open to those FB visitors to your website.

I do not trust facebook, or their stats.

I did a paid advertisement campaign to grow my following for the fan page for my photography.

I picked the demographics I wanted to target. I got tons of new followers. I was so excited and curious to find out who all these people were who showed interest in my work, and as I browsed the new followers I got the feeling they may not even be real people. Every single one of them liked thousands of pages, ( I know FB has a limit of how many you can like, but it's way beyond the amount anyone would even have time to like). Thousands of unreleated pages to boot, and their profiles didn't seem to look like typical active facebook profiles. Many of them were from obscure foreign countries, and I couldn't find any evidence that any of them fell within the demographics that I targeted with the campaign.

I was suspicious of FB stats long before I tried the advertising. I was so excited when I reached the number of followers to get stats for my fanpage, within less than a week of reviewing the stats it was painfully obvious that they were completely over inflated.

I have heard the stories of people getting fake likes from their adds on FB, but I'm sure I really buy into that, I would think once the word got out people would just stop, and FB would be the losers.

I ran a couple of adds on FB, on the last one I decided that trying to market to people in a "Shotgun" approach wasn't the most productive, what I did was every person that "liked" the image I invited them to like my FB business page, I did pick up several followers, and my sales did increase, not sure if it was FB that got me the sales, but I do know I sold more than I have sold before, or since, I have just been waiting to get past the first of year slump, and going to try a couple of other things.

TL Mair
http://tlmair.com

Facebook Fraud

@ Jeffery. Awesome post. THX for sharing

An effective advertising campaign requires consistent messaging over a long period of time. People don't react until at least the sixth time they see something. The individual artist rarely has the budget required to compete with all of the companies out there advertising.

You also shouldn't expect immediate results like a direct mail campaign. The seed is planted perhaps the first time they see the ad, then in a year when they move into a new apartment they start thinking about buyer art.

Do they buy yours? Maybe if you are still advertising at that point. More likely they buy from the place they see ads from all the time.

Jeffery,

That video is very outdated.

Facebook came up with something better and legitimate.

FB now possibly assigns a value to each profile. That value is how often you engage Fan Pages. Some of those values are for likes, others for follows, etc.....clicks.

Now you run the ad and the ad finds those higher value targets. Not people buying art, but people that will click on an ad, any ad.

Part of FB's basic system is security. Basically the pages you see are controlled by different group settings on profiles. Adding these value characteristics is part in parcel of the entire concept. I first saw similar profile security set ups in Windows NT. FB is genius for how it plays on those controls.

Dave

Thanks for the feedback.

Ya. I am not going to doing again.

I tried it - waste of time and money. I didn't even get that many clicks and no sales.

I think that people have very unrealistic expectations on in regards to advertising and ad budgets.

Most people successfully doing advertising build out their spend as a percentage of profit margin. For instance...power player real estate agents will slice 20% off of their commission and invest it back in to their business. $2,000 on a larger $10k commission. If they are just starting then they need to come up with the $2,000 first. But most do not have that so they have to do sweat equity things to get the ball rolling. Open houses, door knocking, hitting up family/friends/church for business.

At no point though do they expect to see results on a budget less than a couple hundred dollars.

My point is that your $6.00 ad run didn't fail you. It was just the first $6.00 of the $600 total ad spend that you shaould have been planning to shell out from the get-go.

Also, the cost should not bother you if it will ultimately be based on a percentage of profit after the trial phase is worked through.

Think about it. Let's say that you would have to spend $500 in advertising to get $750 in profits here in print sales after FAA takes theirs. But the minimum spend was $500. Would you do it?

You better have answered yes. If you said no...then your business thinking need to be correctes because what I described is a license to print money. You stick $500 in the machine and it spits out $750 on the other side. You do it again. And again. And again. It's a no brainer.

But what if you do not have $500 lying around? No problem. You just go get it. Earn it some way. People do all the time. And what if the minimum number isn't $500? It costs $6,000 minimum to start up the machine? No problem. Just go get it.

Ultimately though, nobody should expect to see returns on small ad budgets. Online advertising courses say to do $100 test runs just to see how good a campaign is at getting email signups. Not even selling anything. Just TESTING an email signup campaign is $100. Then, when you find one that converts...you bank roll it with four-figure budgets to get LOTS of email signups.

Then you spend a couple grand more remarketing to these people...and over time they buy in spades and you get all your money back and plenty more.

Brian,

Many of the people in this thread have a pretty good understanding of the quality of different campaigns.

If you spend money on FB ads buyer beware. Getting clicks on FB on an ad means very little.

Dave

"My point is that your $6.00 ad run didn't fail you."

Beautiful post, Brian. Thanks for taking the time to break it down in such a logical, educational way.


Dan Turner
Dan Turner's Seven Keys to Selling Art Online

Dan,

The $6 is besides the point. FB ads are not directed at buyers. $600 would not do well either.

Dave

/

Brian is right on the money. Search ads on Google/Bing will likely yield the highest conversion rates because those people are actually actively looking for what you are selling if you drill down and target your ads correctly. Facebook wouldn't be raking in billions in ad dollars if their ad platform didn't deliver buyers but it is a different beast and you're not likely to be reaching people who are actively looking for that one particular image you are selling.

The best bet for paying for online advertising online if you don't already have a brand and.or a following would be to pick an LTP, set it with a markup of around $100, setup a campaign on Google or Bing/Yahoo and set a budget for your profit margin. If you can spend anything less than $100 per sale then you run that campaign all day long. If you have actual conversion stats then you can continually make it more efficient and keep working to get the cost per conversion down. Here you have no useful sales stats so its a shot in the dark as to exactly what is working.

Ideally you would test different size prints and price points but with the CPC of search ads, I suspect you'd have to sell larger prints with at least a $100 markup in order to turn a profit.

Alternatively you could run ads that link to a search results page of "bryce canyon prints" or "horseshoe bend prints" or "sedona watercolor prints" or something like that and run ads for that keyword. In that case you'd expose buyers to a much larger variety of options and could be reasonably sure it was the ad campaign that brought in the sale.

To really have a chance to get off the ground would probably take a test budget of at least $1,000 and much better stats than we have here.

Adam,

LTP??

Thanks,

Dave

LTP - Limited Time Promotion. See Behind the Scenes, under Marketing. https://fineartamerica.com/controlpanel/index.html?tab=promotions

Well, I just made a new friend at Starbucks this afternoon. A guy approaching 30 years old. Very nice guy. He is a photographer. Interesting stuff. He has been interviewed by the BBC and other news outlets nationally. He did a FB series of videos five years ago. He made up a thing having to do with his FB friend's profile shots and the advent of SM.

He mainly does wedding photography now. But he is very ambitious. Thing is he runs ads on FB successfully. The way he does it is he sees someone announce their engagement and he targets them specifically. I did not ask for more detail than that.

He recommended IG, FB's sister site, but not for sales. He believes he gets a lot of followers that way. He has 600 followers in 8 months on IG.

He does not like Twitter for artists, because it is less visual.

Some of you might be under 30, but most here are not. The perspective of someone who really grew up with SM is interesting.

Need to add, the engagement announcements he sees are friends of friends on FB often the folks are in their 20s.

Dave

I see there is a difference of opinion on whether or not $ is wasted on FB advertising.

It was just $6, but I can't see doing it again, it produced nothing

In the future I am going to try an LTP on Google ads. See what happens.

Right now, my money is tied up in buying more inventory to show in a gallery.

Hi, I work in social media and ministry circle - often, you have many "fake" accounts and numbers of hits and views are debatable on Facebook.

Hence, best to focus on your target market - and send your art in person to appropriate groups/individuals/websites, join art circles in your local area...and branch out by social media and international websites that focus on art.

In my local area in Tokyo, the library helps me to give special classes and so forth.....

Thanks for the insight. =)

I also belong to over 60 various FB groups. I post for free to some combination of them depending on the art's subject matter. I reach over 2 million members each time I post to 40 plus groups. The actual boiled down numbers are around 1000 and up engage. 2200 is a high with this method in a 36 hour period.

Addition my engagement rates are increasing within those groups as people get to know my art.

The 1000 to 2200 is reach, which is a weak marketing term for being seen. Not viewed....more like impressions, but a bit better.

Dave

There are different ways to spend money on FB. For instance, you can promote your page to get more likes. This....IMO...is a waste of time and money because you are diluting your pool you market to. You want people who love your work to like your page of their own accord. There is also the threat, as in the movie above, that some of those "likes" aren't real people at all.

However, boosting relevant posts you make and being able to target that to a specific set of people in a geographic region who have specific interests is incredibly effective for me. It puts my art in front of people who would otherwise never see it, and who have a tendency to love it.. Over time, it builds my audience, which builds impressions, which builds more audience, all of which leads to sales.

Sure I can't always track that THIS money lead to THESE sales, but I can track how more impressions leads to more sales, and boosting helps me economically get more sales.

I try to keep my advertising budget at 5% of my gross monthly. It is money well spent.

Thomas, very interesting post, thank you!

A really effective targeting seems to be the key factor. Geographic region is easy but could you elaborate on the other factors? How do you find your 'specific set of people'? I tried some FB Ads in the past but my targeting was to broad. "People that live in the US, age 25+, interested in Home Decor" may just lead to nothing...

Angelina I only run very targeted ads on Facebook and echo Thomas' point. One of my current ads is aimed at people in my region of Italy who are Italian speakers and the ad is in Italian. The other is the same ad in English. Both of these ads are working very well for me.

You might look into your Facebook notifications from time to time, I just got offered a $10 Ad Coupon from Facebook for one of my posts.

I took the money and boosted the post, using a lookalike audience I created from the FB Pixel I installed on my blog some months ago.

No high hopes but it's free... :-)

I don't think the Facebook Ads are very effective.


"62 Percent of Small Business Owners Say Facebook Ads Don't Work. Here's Why Experts Disagree."


https://www.inc.com/marla-tabaka/62-of-small-business-owners-say-facebook-ads-dont-work-experts-disagree.html

Here are the results for the free ad (ad coupon worth 10 €) that Facebook offered me, if anyone is interested:

Summary
1,185 People Reached
94 Engagements
€10.00 Total Spend

Actions
Photo Clicks 16
Link Clicks 2
Page Likes 9
Shares 4

Hi.

That's smart Dorothy.

Thanks Ricardo. I'll check that out.

I also got the ten dollars Matthias. I ran an ad and the results were better than my six dollar ad. I gained some followers and some people interacted. I don't think it produced actual sales but it did make more people aware of me.

I'm going to do some more research. Maybe I will do occasional ad runs ad test it out.