Advertising On Facebook?

The problem with boosting posts on Facebook is, while you can target some pretty specific demographics they're still mainly divided by location, age, education, and gender.

They don't have the kind of interest targeted advertising that I'd like to do.

For instance, I'd like to target my lighthouse images to people who have signed up to the lighthouse groups, seaside living, boating groups, pretty much anything nautical. Can't seem to do that so far.

Plus, early on, there were complaints of boosted posts going to "like farms", so not to real users.

I have not used the ads on Facebook yet but I have used the boost. I generally use a $10.00 cost spread over 3 days and set my target area. I have played with this to gain viewers and to sell product over the past couple years. What I find is on a 6 month stretch doing it a couple times a month sales and amount of new viewers tended to dwindle and Facebook would send me notice to boost for $20 or $30.00 to reach more....almost like they were restricting the views to get me to spend more.

I suspended using boost for 2 months and when I boosted a photo after a 2 month break....I received more viewers and sales again. So what I do is figure that is what they try to achieve is for you to continually increase your amount you are spending and restrict flow to do it....at least it seems that way to me.

So I run a couple boosts a month for four months, take a break for two months and then run another stretch for four months. I target different interests, different areas to test. Even at $20.00 a month its better than taking a small ad out in my local sales shopper and better results.

Facebook knows everyone wants increased likes.....and plays on that. I want sales....somewhere I have made it work for me directing people back with a link to FAA and build my business page viewers as well with actual people and not bots. Just all a part of the marketing strategy for me.

I don't have enough completed works yet to be able to give a good answer on how to deploy Facebook ads for selling fine art specifically, but i have done it in real estate and real estate photography and can shed some insight.

Ideally...you need to divide up people into two groups. People who HAVE been to your website...and those who have NOT been to your website. And you need to have two seperate plans to market to these people...and ideally...two dedicated advertisign budgets. So if you have $5.00 per day to spend....it should be $2.50 spent trying to get people who have never been exposed to your personal brand to visit your website...and $2.50 trying to get people who HAVE been to your website to come back again.

Spending money getting attention from new people could be considered "front end" advertising and the money spent getting previous viewers to come back as "back end" advertising. This second group is primarily referred to as "Remarketing" or "Retargeting". And it is likely that this second group is worth more than the first.

But here are some front-end marketing ideas:

1) Vacationer Targeting - people go on vacation to Ocean City Maryland. Maybe you have some images from Ocean City that you'd like to sell them. So you run an ad targeted toward people who are VISITING Ocean City. By focusing on those visiting you are by default EXCLUDING those who live there. Vacationers want to take back a piece of their vacation, but the window of opportunity is short. So you want to run the ad with that in mind. That is...don't run it for "anyone who has visited Ocean City Maryland in the last 6 months" but rather "Anyone visiting Ocean City Maryland now". People who went there months ago are "out of the vacation mindset" and are not likely to buy...those who are there now are likely to buy.

My suggestion for an ad format would be to simply take a bunch of Ocean City images and slam then together with a slideshow producing software like Proshow Producer. Then run a video ad. Make the emphasis of the ad "to get clicks" not "to get views". It's a video ad...but you can still tell Facebook to tweak things so that you get clicks.

2) Interest Targeting - So I just jumped into Power Editor and drafed up a dummy campaign. In the "Detailed Targeting" box under the "Ad Set" control panel I typed in "Steampunk". They said that there are 6,684,000 people interested in Steampunk. There is also a "Steampunk Art" subset you can pick...but there are only 9,700 people who are in that group. My guess is that there are a lot more people interested in Steampunk Art hidden within the 6 MILLION people interested in steampunk...it's just that they have not liked pages and things that sub-categories them into the "steampunk art" set.

So you could run an ad targeting people in the Steampunk community. Since there are so many you likely would want to limit down by income and target those who make $65,000 per year or more....so you know they have money to spend.

Sample plan. Take sample images, slam them together as a slideshow video. Optimize the ad for clicks and not views. Run. Boom.

Here's a back-end marketing ideas:

General Remarketing - you want to stay in front of people. Consistent exposure to your brand is key. My guess is that two-week intervals is neither too frequent or too sparse. So put the Facebook "pixel" code on your website so that visitor can be tagged as having visited it.

Then...create an ad targeting people who have visited your website...but have NOT visited it in the last 14 Days.

Take a single piece of art and do three different mockup images and a special "end slate" image that incorportates the picture in a frame on the wall on the left and a "call to action" saying something like, "See this one and more at MikeSavad.com".

Put them in the slideshow software and make a video transitioning from just the image...then fade to the first mockup...then the second...then the third...then the end slate image...which is extend out in the video for a good minute so it's just sitting there at the end like a static image even though it's 60 seconds of video.

Again, video format targeting clicks and not views driving them to the website. The URL you put into the campaign will be enfused into the "See More" button that shows up under the video. That link should take them DIRECTLY to the video in the image. But if they manually type in "MikeSavad.com" in the browser per the call to action in the end of the video...then they'll just go to your homepage.

Create a new one of these every day with a different one of your pieces and run them out of your "remarketing budget".

Facebook offered me to boost a post and reach a potential of 2 clicks for $2. They didn't say who the clicks would come from just "the right people" and clicks does not = sales so I said no thank you. I might have said ok for at least 20 clicks... maybe... I'm not helping much am I?

I've heard a lot of the same things you've heard but nothing to compel me to pay to play at FB.

I just recently created a business/artist page and started posting photos on it, joined a couple of groups with interests that match some of my photos, shared posts to those groups, and boosted a couple of them for a few days. I have photos of the Minneapolis area, and of birds in Minnesota, so it makes sense to target those areas. For other things, I didn't find any appropriate groups.

I've only done this for a couple of weeks. So far I'm getting a bunch of 'likes' and a few people have 'liked' my page too, and even a couple of 'followers'. I have absolutely zero trust or belief in FB and I could easily believe that 'boosting' is mostly a scam and does nothing but make money for FB. And whatever I end up doing, FB will no doubt change the rules again and make it obsolete.

It's nice to find out that many people actually do like what I do, if they ever see it. It seems pretty unlikely that this would generate sales, but I'll throw money at it for a few months and keep learning the system. I guess the next step would be to find out how to boost in ways that reach people with the right interests. Is that what "ad words" are about?

my page was never that successful. boosts i do worry about, because as said, years ago they were found to be fake. but maybe they were priming the pump? since i know others here said they made money by doing that. but i only hear about the wins. like i think thomas said he did $100 and got like $3000 in sales. which is ideal. but i don't know what else was spent and nothing came out of it.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I just read on Twitter the other day a post from a photographer I follow and he said that FB is getting ready to revamp all their algorithms again to give more attention to peoples personal posts and unless you are paying thousands of dollars your'e more than likely not going to be seen. Here's the article he posted:
https://www.richardbernabe.com/facebook-news-feed-photographers/

quote from that article...
"And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.”

I would like to know how Zuckerberg knows that looking at our art and photos is not meaningful... meaningful by whose standards?

that's the reason i'm wondering - if i pay $10 will anyone see these posts with the new thing facebook is doing.

as of late the only thing i notice is, my stream is full of people i've commented on, and some of it is many days old. nothing really new in there.

otherwise i'll have to toss out the idea of paying anything if none of it will ever be seen at all. i think though that if enough smaller people don't pay anything at all, facebook will revert. lots of smalls equals money too.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I doubt anyone really knows yet what these changes will be in reality. And even FB can't predict their long term effects.

I tried one boost on FB last December and didn't like how they do business. I don't think paying for impressions works for me and I didn't get but a few clicks in the boost. I still try the free posting of images from FAA, but they get cropped off too much by the scraper and look terrible. One viewer, that just likes to visit your page, could eat up your $2 a day real quick. If FB changes their system for ads to produce understandable results, I would try them again.

i guess my intuitive laziness paid off this time. hate to think i spent money, learned it all and got nothing at all out of it.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

my inner cheapskate prevents me from spending money on places like that, my outer cheapskate agrees. but i also need to find ways for people to see the work more. the problem with a lot of these guides are, they are years old, and probably expired in usefulness.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Finishing the article actually cheered me up. I pulled away from FB awhile back and started pouring into my G+ and Twitter efforts even more... I like Twitter and I hope they do become the place for business networking.

Twitter hit the wall because only a small percentage of people ever figured it out. FB on the other hand is almost too easy - people end up just passively staring at stuff scrolling by.

@Lara - the new Facebook update is not going to require you to pay "thousands and thousands" of dollars to get seen.

But you likely WILL have to pay.

Facebook ads "buy your way into" the news feed. Red rope access. Special treatment.

The hit that business pages are going to take is on ORGANIC reach. That is...people who have liked your page in the past...they will pretty much never see your stuff anymore if you don't pay to be in front of their eyes.

This has been happening for years and years now. I have heard so many photography podcast hosts complain about how they have 150,000 likes but they examine their stats and when they post something it is only seen by less than 1,500 people.

So this is not something new...rather it is the last nail in the coffin. Facebook has said that they are going to demote everything from business/brand pages unless it is HIGHLY valuable. So even highly shared viral videos are going to take a hit.

Basically, the only things that are going to show up are "Facebook Live" and stuff that gets TONS of comments.

But they also said they are monitoring for "gaming" the system. So telling people to comment in order to be entered into a drawing...they are watching for that. They know what it looks like. So you can't play tricks to get game the system. Either you stuff has the true organice "nature" of high quality, highly interactive content....or it does not.

The silver lining to this is that Facebook DID say that the "see first" thing will save you on organic. Everyone can "like" so many things and then upgrade that like from "normal" follow to "see first". If you can training your people to not just "like" your page, but upgrade it to "see first" then you are back in the organic..free traffic game.

If you do NOT have a plan to get them to "see first" you....then you will need to resort to paid ads. Those WILL get your stuff seen. Because that's how Facebook makes money. If ad revenue drops....their stock drops...and it WILL drop if people buy ads and their stuff isn't seen. Because then they'll stop buying ads.

So "see first", "Facebook Live", and "advertising" is the new Face of Facebook success. Hope that sets the record straight.

I don't think one person in a thousand will ever use "see first."

Basically it sounds like "click bait" has to be replaced by "comment bait." Or, we just pay and pray.

To get a real deal with ads, on facebook or google as well, first you have to study the market, the customers, and many marketing strategies that can fit you style of art. Then you have to setup the ads as precisely as possible, choosing the most suitable parameters for the purpose.

But even in this way it's not easy to convert the money spent on sales, not at least immediately. A good marketing campaign requires months and hundreds of dollars spent and a good fan page to start with. The idea of spending $10 or $20 on Facebook to automatically make it 500 or 1000 is pure illusion. It is simply another job, for which there are professionals and agencies paid specifically. Doing it yourself, i think, is perfectly useless and counterproductive.

Great post, Brian!

To me, it is not about FB as much as it is about FAA not telling us where our buyers are coming from.

Until FAA furnishes that information I would not recommend spending much if anything on paid advertising. And the problem with that is that unless you put together a sustainable, repetitive advertising plan, you should not expect much more than minimal results. Advertising is like anything else, you get what you pay for.

As far selling on FB, yup... it still works just the way it is. I posted four paintings for sale in 5 or 6 of my groups and two of them sold in the first 24 hours. That was yesterday. And no, I did not boost those posts.

As far as selling off a fan page, or the FAA shop page or any of those pages.... I have nothing what so ever that even suggests to me that that has ever happened. I no longer waste time with those pages.

Agree, Andrea.

$10 or $20 here and there will take a significant amount of luck to glean any meaningful results.

The biggest problem I have seen here for the past five years is the lack of even basic understanding of how advertising works.

The big beneficiary of the latest FB changes will be, of course, all those gurus and consultants offering to teach us how to play the new game - or do it for us, for a price.

Some people have the talent to create art and some have a talent for teaching or educating people on whatever it is people want to be taught or educated in.

I fail to see why one would have more respect or rights to sell their talents than the other.

Some people get it, they see and appreciate the value of art and they are willing to pay for it. Others people see and appreciate the value of education and learning and are willing to pay for it.

i have a pretty good idea which markets i would try first so i think i have that part covered. but i never understood the amounts people use.

the thought that one guy used $20-30 a day spending $1 a day. he didn't say what he got out of that. facebook fudges the numbers on stats, they said recently they were caught messing with stats on how long people actually look at videos. i don't see how facebook would know how much money you make or whether your male or female (because people share accounts).

they only know age because people put in their age, and it could be anything either.

then you hear about the success stories, i spent $20 and got thousands in sales, i think it was a bounce house, he checked off friends and fans of friends or something and got a on of money. but didn't go that far into it. its hard to tell if that was a planted story. its like when someone goes out gambling and they say - check it out i made a $1000 i'm awesome. until you ask how much they spent, and they say $5000.

i've been doing pretty well with free, but its getting to be much harder now. on twitter i can't seem to find how to follow someone back. i haven't followed anyone back in over a year because of how they changed that. but i don't think people see the posts anyway unless they turn notifications on so it may not matter. i'm pretty sure there are paid tweets, but i haven't looked those up at all.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I tried to boost 3 times, with small amounts (less than 10$ ,I know is peanuts, but I considered that time hell a lot lol ) and my experience was, that the post reached almost nobody, even so they promised some thousand reach, it was almost nothing..
I go far better organic way, just to say something in groups, or do something on my page.

And because I dont have hundreds to spend, or experience with bigger amounts, I gave up, all in all boosting.
I hated also when you boost something for x amount, straight it says, add more money to reach more people.. It was kind of a suggestion, what I am doing is like a kiss for a dead... nothing.

Or recommending boosting for local.. nobody buys here anything local, only fish and coffee lol (portugal)

I believe for them is a good money from small businesses, the little amounts add up, but I think it is worthless..
One of my boost was Calendars, and I thought if only from that 3000 targeted cat lover people at least 2 buys a calendar, I am ok, and I wont loose a thing.. But they showed the ad for less than 50 persons, meanwhile they were asking for more and more, so I felt cheated ...

Mike, on Twitter if you have your notifications turned on it will show you who recently followed you and if you hover your mouse over their small avatar a drop down appears where you can follow them back right from there or like I do you can click on their avatar and go to their profile to see who they are and what they are about before cilcking the follow button on the right side of the page.

I usually spend a few minutes in the morning and late at night responding to tweets or thanking people for retweets and I also use the free version of communIT to help me stay connected... it tells me who I need to thank who followed me and various other stats. Then I use Tweetdeck sometimes to schedule tweets to go out at different times of the day so they don't seem too spammy. I have been getting a lot more retweets and traffic from Twitter since I started making an effort to engage more, which is really hard for me because I am actually not all that social...I can go for days and not talk to anyone if I am not careful. lol

Revenues are a product of advertising and advertising is a product of revenues.

How much you spend is usually a percentage of gross revenues. Assuming you enter into a valid and successful advertising campaign the revenues should grow. That in effect will grow the advertising dollars proportionally.

The Small Business Administration recommends 7-8% of gross revenues for a small business. They consider a small business a business that is doing under $5 Million a year in total gross reves with a net, net, net profit of no less than 10-12%.

Unfortunately, that is not always realistic for a business that is doing significantly less than $5 million or new business startups.

If you have very low or no revenues, then you have to look at the investment in advertising as an investment in your business. How you set that budget should be a part of your overall business plan. Your business plan should include projections on where you want to go with your business and should include a short, medium and long-term module including revenue projections and how you are going to get there.

If you set your short-term projects at $50K the first year then your ad budget should be 7-8% of that $50k, if you are following the Small Business Administrations guidelines.

If you have low or no revenues it is a little trickier. You have to make some sort of projections as to where you want to go with your business. This should be part of some sort of overall business plan. You set short term, medium and long-term revenues goals. To get started you may want to consider using that 7-8% figure for advertising on your short-term revenue projections.

If you set your short-term goals of $50K in the first 12 months then you would spend $3500 ($291 a month) using the 7% recommendation. If your goals are more or less then you adjust accordingly.

The problem comes if you are setting realistic goals of lower revenues then the percentage is going to have to be raised or you are simply not going to have a realistic budget to make the kind of impact you need to grow your business.

When we were in the agency business we would not sign a new client unless they had $1000 per month plus production costs to spend.

What we did instead is we sold them a service where we helped them develop a business plan and a public relations program that gave them a lot of exposure in the community with minimum costs. It was very successful for those that worked the program.

As Dora and others point out, FB isn't really guaranteeing anything in return for your 'boost' money. I see so many people here saying they tried 'boosting' for a while and gave up. In the long run, though, the market should force FB to give us more bang for the buck, or cut the price. It's like arcade video games - maybe the first couple of times you play, you get 10 seconds and feel cheated; but eventually you have to start getting some serious play time or you'll stop pumping quarters.

https://www.39celsius.com/why-facebook-boosted-posts-are-a-waste/

A great post and explanation why Boost don't work and how ads can give you a better bang for a buck.

Mike, on Facebook is impossibile to make an ads for only 1$ a day. The minimum is about $5, for any less amount it is impossible to create a campaign that reaches a minimum number of people, and the same Facebook returns an error message, and doesn't allow to move forward in the creation process. That's why stories like that (1$ per day) are invented.

I only used one 10.00 boost and got a few new likes
Forbes is my "go to" reference for info, Here is an interesting article that should help you be more successful with your ads: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sujanpatel/2017/02/04/10-mistakes-newbies-make-with-paid-facebook-ads/#219d3deb2d2a

Great article Judy!

I think ad copy, is one of the most important factors of an ad and it is one of the most common mistakes I see when I look at people's ads as well as their Facebook posts in general and on their pages groups.

This article covers this in items numbers 5 & 6.

Mistake #5 - You don’t get to the point

Let’s face it - you aren’t running ads for your health. You’re advertising on Facebook to make a profit, and to do that, you have to be able to capture the (admittedly limited) attention of your audience and persuade them to take an action you’ve specified.

That’s where the call-to-action (CTA) in your ad copy comes into play. Brad Smith, writing for AdEspresso, makes it clear why this is so important:

“Your ad copy is there to sell the click-through, not the product or service. So don’t go on a long winded explanation of features, benefits, outcomes. Instead, (a) grab attention and (b) create enough intrigue so people click through for more. That’s it. Nothing less, and nothing more.”


For best results, Smith recommends ~14 words for your ad post text, and ~18 words for your link description. Basically, keep it simple, and keep it straightforward.

Mistake #6 - You use too much text in your ads
Stop me if this has happened to you before… You have your creative team put together a killer custom image featuring a user testimonial. It looks great, and you queue it into your ads campaign - only to have it rejected by Facebook’s ad text rule.

Though the current iteration of the rule is somewhat ambiguous, the key takeaway is that text-heavy images stand to suffer diminished distribution, compared to those with no or low text. Save time on rejected ads by keeping text to a minimum in the first place.

What Floyd said earlier is true. It is IMPOSSIBLE to use Facebook Advertising (or Google Adwords advertising for that matter) at the highest level without access to the "sales confirmation page".

To use Facebook advertising at a high level you need to be able to design campaigns that drive actual sales. Facebook can "learn" what types of things are resulting in more sales and what are not. But in order to do that you need to be able to put the Facebook "pixel" on the page that confirms the sale happened.

Without that ability, you are advertising like it's 2002 again. Running ads and GUESSING if sales came from the ad...from organic traffic from Facebook...from organic search engine traffic...from your newsletter blasts....

...you have NO idea. You are just guessing. So that's a downside.

You could spend thousands before figuring out what message and what target works.

How many people have to click through before you find a buyer? 100? 200? More likely 500.

How much is this going to cost? $2 for two click? Hmmmm. How much is a buyer worth? $5 - $300?

Do they buy once and that's it or are they likely to repeat? What time of year are they most likely to buy? How many times do they need to see your stuff before committing to a purchase?

Plan to spend a lot of money figuring out these questions.

Well, just threw $10 a day for 7 days into an ad with as small and specific an audience as I could narrow it down to. It's still a potential group of 6 million people.

Linked to the Lighthouses collection on my AW. Let's see if there's a marked up tick in views in that collection.

Like I said earlier - FB has to improve this situation so people start to feel they're getting their money's worth, somehow. That might require tie-ins to online sellers like FAA, and maybe some incentive to those sellers to create those links. Otherwise everyone's going to try FB advertising once, for a little while, then give up.

Google Analytics are great and I know some people know just where people came from to a cart page by using it on the premium.

Perhaps try that

google is a good start, but i find the info limiting and confusing.

like yesterday i showed only about 20 people on the AW. but the new users showed 250, which made no sense. there isn't a tree showing me exactly who came from where. i know its facebook, but it doesn't show a group. it seems to strip off useful things.

like if i get a view and its for a cart insert, i'd like to know what state they were from. they show me the state, but not what they looked at. or they show me what they looked at but ID it with a useless number and its totally out of order and i only see one at a time.

i can get general stats with it, but as a convenient tool, it lacks greatly. stat counter was so much better. even for the one page it loaded on.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I pay the people at Network.solution/web.com a lot of money to get data from other sites for me. They know just a little about GA and tracking data on the net.

They can not get that data from FAA using Google Analytics or any other system.

You can get some data from GA, but not the kind of data that it takes to properly track advertising results, imho.

I want to know exactly where my sales come from. I look at GA and then look at my last sale or two or three or however many. There is NO mention of those sales or the sales pages anywhere on GA.

Right now I am looking at the last two sales I made in last 7 days and the tiles. I am looking at GA for the same seven days and nowhere does it tell me those pages were even visited.

GA will tell you where some of, not all, of your SM your visitors are coming from. So they may tell you that you are getting 1000 views from Twitter and 200 from FB. But they will not tell you the sales conversion. You may be getting 20 sales from the 200 FB views but only 5 from the 1000 Twitter views. And they will not tell you exactly which post to twitter or FB the sale came from.

As far as I am concerned there is no data coming from GA that would use to launch any kind significant advertising plan. Frome that data above, you would naturally concentrate your efforts on Twitter because you got 5 times more hits. But the best bet for sales would be FB.

I use GA also and while I have learned a lot of general things the data I really need, like keywords and search engines used I either don't know how to find or it is not available... GA seems harder to learn than Gimp...

Yeah, Shelli, I have problems also but that is mainly as I do not have the time to read up about it. But I know of two people here (one in the forum occasionally) who use it like that. They do all their marketing and can track most everything using it

Abbie,
good news! that means there is hope for me yet if I just find time to read it. I usually do that kind of research when I can't sleep at night. :)

and then you can teach me LOL

I am a better learner than teacher but I would try... lol, sleep well!

"like keywords and search engines used I either don't know how to find or it is not available"

Neither of them are there.

"They don't have the kind of interest targeted advertising that I'd like to do. "

Uhhh......yeah they do.

I have been on record lots of times saying that boosting posts works for me. The key is to boost posts that people are interacting with, or that they want to interact with. Zuckerberg is making it even more based on how much people are interacting with your post, so you better figure out how to get those likes comments and shares.

A two-step approach may be better. And simpler. Just switch your focus from getting sales to getting email signups for your newsletter. That is very measurable.

So create a plant to use FB ads to drive traffic and get newsletter signups....then use your newsletter to get sales.

All the online marketing gurus keep saying that their email list is their biggest sales asset. So maybe that is a better use of FB advertising.

Thanks Floyd, I was afraid of that. :(

@Brian
that is the best idea I've heard yet...

Thomas Zimmerman

Can I make a list of Facebook groups and pages and target ads only to people who have joined them?

If so, how?

Before I totally give up on my facebook page which does still get a view once in a while, I decided to take Brian's idea and implement it.

So this morning I changed my shop button to a sign up button and linked to a landing page on my art blog site that I have had since before I got my AW, and I made the landing page have only one post which is a form to subscribe to my email list for my monthly newsletter.

Now I will begin posting different things to try to attract some activity since I have been pretty much MIA for a long time and lets see if I can get any takers... if not then there is an option to pay to get subscribers and I might try that.

Thanks for the idea Brian!

I like to connect with real people, and facebook is a part of that. If you write posts that people feel good about responding to, it's a step forward in sales at the end of the day.

Like here on FAA, always stay clear of politics, religion and what else? Anything negative.

Does it make sense to include hashtags in boosted posts?

I am not sure about on boosted posts but I have started adding them to my regular posts.

Interesting update: so I made a couple more changes to my formerly dormant FB page besides adding the sign up button I also changed the name, changed it from a community page to an artist page updated my cover and profile images and invited all my friends to like it again then I enable the FB app here to auto post my new art and my likes went from 89 to 104 overnight. also my post reach improved. I checked into boosting posts to a target audience and if I spend $3 to boost a post they said the potential audience would be about 800 people. My estimated clicks if I promote my page went up to 3 for $2...

I am not quite ready to pay to promote just yet I am going to spend some more effort first trying to build a better organic audience and then try the paid promotions and will update again later if this thread is still open.

I've boosted a few posts, targeted them with a couple of words, and did get dozens of 'likes' and apparently a handful of visits to the FAA pages. Looking at who 'liked' the posts, they seem to be a pretty crazy assortment of people from all over. No idea if they really connected with the keywords - some were fringe-y types with nothing on their own timelines but shares of political rants and the occasional pictures of grandkids - no interest in art or photography that I could see. Maybe they just sit there passively scrolling and 'liking' things.

I get the feeling I could do this forever, spend tons of money, get hundreds of likes and never sell a print. But I probably have a lot to learn about FB advertising before giving up.

"But I probably have a lot to learn about FB advertising before giving up."

you and me both Jim! I am just trying things to see what works... worst case scenario I waste a little money to learn what does not work...

my fave quote

"I have not failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that won't work"
~Thomas Edison

if i was spending someone else's money i would have no trouble experimenting...


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I get you Mike...

I thought I would pretend like I still smoke cigarettes and the money I would have wasted on them anyway I will use for this...at least this way there is potential to get something back for it besides lung cancer.

There has been a recent rash of fraudulent charges from checking accounts, supposedly from FB.
I wouldn't spend real money there, just so I don't have to sort out what is legit and what is fraud later.....

Here's another question. We all have some images we think are really our best. I'm starting out posting a few of those, thinking they might get me a 'page likes' or followers. Eventually, if I keep doing this, maybe I build up a lot of followers and don't need to 'boost' everything.

The thing about a post or a 'boost' is that it's only good for a short time - it streaks across the sky and burns out. But we want our best sellers out there, long term. Should we re-boost them every now and then?

Jim, I have no idea. I might try re-posting them from time to time. I do that on Twitter quite a bit, or you could make a post with a slideshow of your best work and pin it to the top of your page. I use pinned posts a lot too on Twitter and G+ and now FB...

@Jim - in regards to re-posting/boosting your "best work"...you may wish to come up with a "reason why" to do that.

For instance...I am in the midst of launching my new project and redesigning my website. One of the things I am going to make "standard" in my fine art business is this:

When an item sells...it goes on the "Recently Sold" page. Seven days later...the price for that whole set goes up. By 10%.

I will focus on communicating that idea consistently to my target audience in order to 'train' them to expect that as normal.

That being the case, any time something sells, I now have a reason to re-post it. And reboost that post.

"Hey everyone, just wanted to say that this image of _____ just sold. #YouKnowWhatThatMeans"

Eventually, the cream will rise to the top. The market will tell me what my "best images" are...because they'll keep buying them. And then I'll keep posting them...and then people will keep buying them....and I'll keep posting them.

On the flips side...my "least valuable images" will get little to no attention. Which is good. You want the attention focused on the winners...not the losers.

Feel free to take this general idea and adapt it as you see fit.

Advertising on facebook works, but advertising our FAA products one by one is hard to make a profit on because of the mark-up. My strategy with facebook is to get people clicking on a link underneath the photo I put on facebook to my blog, where I can show a variety of art pieces and product photos, and link underneath each photo to the print or product or gallery where I sell the original piece. I find the art to look fuzzy on facebook anyway, and it looks much clearer on the blog, and the picture is so much bigger on the blog too.

A blog post also lets you write about the piece, why you made it, what kind of room it looks great in, and so on. I can also sell my original art work from my blog with the prints and products.

My blog is on a Google platform with Google Plus, and the two work nicely together in terms of the search engine -- and it is all free. If you want to pay, Google will let you do that to get higher in the searches. People on Google shop. People on facebook talk to friends and family, so I feel there is not as much bang for your buck as Google.

Having said that, the best way to market is to every and any old customer through a newsletter, not through facebook.

A note about selling on any media platform: I find that what works better than trying to sell product, by product, by product is focusing on your life as an artist, and your lifestyle as an artist. People like artists, the art lifestyle, the thoughts that go through our head. Buyers like the idea of being "collectors" so much more than they like buying this random piece, and that random piece. They also like to think of their buying as an investment.

One thing I do know is how much Facebook lies about numbers of people that can be reached. I see a boost your post and 77,000 ( sometimes more) people within 40 miles of you will see it for $$.

Problem is there isn't 77,000 people within 40 miles of me. In fact there isn't even 25,000 people and that's pushing it because I would have to include the entire population of this and the four counties around this one and that means far more than 40 miles.

If they lie about that what else are they not telling the truth about.

@James, I think those big numbers refer to people who "might" see your post, based on its targeting. Was your targeting based only on geographic area?

Eventually FB gives you a number of how many were actually "reached", which I guess means it went in their feed, and possibly was even seen, but no guarantee really.

On the other hand, they've already gotten into legal trouble for lying about ad reach.

This was them trying to get me to boost a post based on geographical area. With numbers so inflated for the miles they listed I knew they were just making up numbers to get people to boost. They have offered me the same thing with numbers all over the place for the same given mile radios and not once did they actually line up with the population of this area. It's pretty rural which is why I don't even waste time advertising locally specially with my type of stuff. If it isn't western themed it pretty much collects dust around here.

I agree whole heartily with Thomas. To use FB the ad needs to really draw people in. That is some tough economics for many artists. That does not mean the art is better or worse. FB offers us each the chance to zero in on our audience. If you know that and know they will respond most of the battle is won.

FB has a pixel system it offers, I wish FAA was set up to use it. It is a tracking system. FB says it will improve the responsiveness, I think it will do exactly that.

Remember the naysayers for diet soda clobbered the sugar people. Now diet soda is seeing fading sales for the last four years as people would rather drink sugared sodas. Turns out diet soda is a lot worse for you. What I am saying is the reports that FB was ever a cheat in anyway probably had much more to do with the competition in the space than to do with actual practices.

I set up an ad three months ago where I went to a global audience. Narrowed it down to a few specific interests and let her rip. Soon I was getting a 41% rate of liking. It was dirt cheap. i was in heaven for a day. Then I looked at who was liking my stuff so much. Remember I was asking for a global Worldwide audience? You guessed it, the low hanging fruit was in Vietnam etc.......When I said Western Europe country by country and the US, the whole thing became much more expensive. That was never FB's fault. That was on me for $5 to 10.

But we saw links here three years ago to that exact scenario and the word "fraud" next to it. It was never fraud.

Dave

David, that's the thing; "likes" are just Astroturf.

I don't know where it is coming from but what I keep reading sounds like to me that the average person thinks they should be able to or can spend $10 or $20 every now and again and FB should be guaranteeing them a few sales. Or some variation of that.

If it was that easy, the whole world be doing it and we would all be billionaires or at least millionaires.

Advertising or sales of any product just do not work that way. Unless you are selling something illegal, of course.

People keep talking about reaching 3k or 5k or 10k people. That is not going get you much or anything unless you are extremely lucky. You need to reach tens of thousands even hundreds of thousands, which will add up to millions over a period of time, with a sustained advertising plan to have decent and consistent success.

We have seen this same discussion over and over again with just a little variation for years. Like there is some sort of magic bullet out there and one day someone is going to come along and drop it one of these threads.

This is not ever going to happen.

I've tried boosting. I've tried doing all the cute little tips and tricks to get more traffic and it never worked for me. Although, I did give away plenty of t-shirts. lol! It never returned on investment and I didn't see a point in continuing.

David, that's the thing; "likes" are just Astroturf.

Jim,

Generally speaking the stat is that any work of art that has sold has been seen 6 to 7 times first by the buyer.

So can you form a community of people from MN, reside there or have moved away, who want to follow/like a fan page? Then post to them.

What would those economics look like?

Would the group be big enough to make a difference in your business longer term?

Dave

if you hit the right people, it could work in theory - if they see it. like if i post things to a group, and they have 50,000 members, of which i'm guessing 500-1000 people see it, some of those will click on the image and if they like it, they will get it. the group is a captive audience though and they see it in a stream. in their own stream its tangled with everything else. but if you isolate the people, then you should be able to make it work, even with a small amount of people. but it has to be very specific to get the most from your buck.

like people that just like adobe houses, that live in arizona. or sending a town to a specific town. i still haven't really done anything with it yet. i like the blog idea, but that seems like a lot of work there. wish i wasn't so lazy....


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Mike,

The jump from my lack of know how to Floyd's experience......is a lot of experimenting.

I do not think there is any way around that. Floyd may say do not think this can be done for $20, but you still need to spend several $20s to find your way before any of it works.

Dave

The sheer bombardment of notifications from artists selling on Facebook really turned me off. It has become a discount candy store riddled with everyone trying to sell there. Then you have the non-stop harassment with Facebook themselves trying to tell you that your latest post is doing better than 80 percent of your other posts and you should promote it. Those notifications drive me nuts. Trying to keep them shut down doesn't work. Its just becoming the platform of SM spam to me.

If I can stomach that crap, I can go into my own feed with only 10 percent of my following left, to watch them fight about politics.

FB advertising can only be as good as the targeting. I've started experimenting with that, trying to match photos with interests. What I'm seeing so far is that yes you can get something 'seen' by a lot of people, but I'm not seeing how they have much connection to the supposed interests. So I checked out my own FB interests.

My "interests" were 95% totally random nonsense. There were things I'd definitely never clicked on, ever, anywhere. So if this is the database that FB is using to sell ads, we should all scale our expectations pretty low.

Check your own "interests" and then see if you're still willing to pay for FB "targeted" ads.

"Floyd may say do not think this can be done for $20, but you still need to spend several $20s to find your way before any of it works."

Exactly.

I am running a series of $25 boosts on both FB and Twitter. But my total budget is $2800. Depending on results, as monitored on monthly bases, I may spend that in 2, 3 or 6 months and it may be increased if results warrant it. The first "test" if you want to call it will be $200 for a week on and then one week off and then one week one again for $400 minimum for the first month. I will use this period to tweak the ads if I feel they need it.

I am going to reverse my last year or two trends of NOT advertising my FAA AW for a small portion of that. Most of it will be advertising my other sites

For FAA/AW I am experimenting with a new system where I have consolidated the data of several of my top selling images and come up averages. I will be featuring only those images in the ads. But to get any meaningful data that will tell me if it worked that ads will have to be run over a longer period of time.

For those of you that want to try a low-cost ad plan boosting on FB or Twitter may want to revise the plan, I laid out some months back. Here is the blog where it is laid out. https://fineartamerica.com/blogs/low-cost-social-media-marketing-plan.html

It doesn't matter what the actual dollar amount you spend is. What matters is if you get enough in sales to make it pay. That depends on the number of FAA visits you get for a dollar of advertising, how many of those actually buy something, and what your markup is on those sales. If I spent $20 on ads to get one sale that nets me $30, I win. Now if you're trying to make a living off of all this, that's different. :-)

So where is this "see first" thing we are suppose to ask people on our page to click?

I have heard that an actual ad is the way to do and to not boost posts because of the way Facebook's algorithms are set up you will end up being even less seen because they are wanting you to boost to be seen. That was before the "big change" Facebook decided to go through.

"But my total budget is $2800. Depending on results, as monitored on monthly bases, I may spend that in 2, 3 or 6 months and it may be increased if results warrant it."

Thank you for that, Floyd. Too many people think they can judge advertising with $20 here and there. They are wasting their money. The sad part is they may have spent that $20 in exactly the right direction, but they need a whole lot more money to find out.

A "real" advertising budget applied to real testing over a period of months (not days) will tell an advertiser what works. Or what doesn't; then they need to be prepared to reload and change direction until they actually find out what works for them.


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

Someone has probably mentioned this but for the last few days I have seen very few FAA posts. Normally I see quite a few in the news feed and not just from people I am friends with.

David B, your general strategy sounds right. I'm trying to get followers on my photography page by posting in groups like Minnesota Birding Photography and MInneapolis Skyway System, and targeting a few ads at Minnesota interests. That last part, "interests", is where it gets weird. Like I've said before, my initial impression is that FB's database of user interests isn't worth a hill of beans, judging from how inaccurate my own 'interests' were. But I'm trying to think more creatively and hunt through the available 'interests' looking for something that might work.

For example, there's an "interest" for a chain of bird feeding stores. People that like those stores might like my spectacular bird photos. But they probably already have enough cardinal pictures on their walls.

The trick is to find people who aren't just interested in what's in a photo, but who also sometimes buy prints of photos.

Jim,

That strategy sucks. It sucks literally as of last week when FB went full throttle to limit fan pages.

This is why if I spend $20 or $120.....I still need to learn as the game rules are changing.

I have no problem with those changes or with dropping $100 in an effort. Or even $300. I am getting an education and feedback.

But currently, I am working IG for free. FB will have a harder time getting rid of photos there. In other words we belong on IG not FB.

That said Floyd is doing the right things on a higher order in running ads on FB. I do not have have great shots of CA. I have high end fine art on very low budget prints. This means I can run ads on FB to people who love MoMA and other museums, but I will come up with all net. I will get tons of artists clicking first. I will get some high end followers who do not want less expensive prints. I will NOT get a full boatload of people who buy an interesting new genre on inexpensive substrates. The ads become ineffective. With that audience.

On IG I am attracting a lot of other artists, which is good. Artists can buy art. But I can not afford to pay for them to do so.

I have something else I am playing with elsewhere using a FB ad. If it is a hit, I could make a ton of money. If not I will waste that $20. Or $40, the exact number does not matter that much. The subject would be a quick fad.

Dave

7 days at $10 a day. I promoted a link to the lighthouse collection on my AW.
Didn't see a significant uptick in views to individual images in the gallery.

Ah well.

2,431 People Reached
People who saw your promotion
81 Link Clicks
$69.99 Spent
Total amount spent on this promotion

DS,

If I can ask, who was your target market? Age, gender, country.......interests......?

Did you look up a few magazines that are on lighthouses and use their follower bases?

Dave

DB

Age 26-65+, I'd do 45+ in the future based on response.

No gender specified and the response was about 50-50

Country USA only

Interests "Lighthouse" "New England"

Lighthouse is self explanatory, however there are many ways the word lighthouse could show up as interests that fall out of my target and no way to exclude them. New England because all but one of my lighthouse images so far are from Maine.

As I said to Thomas Zimmerman above, I see no way to target the followers of specific groups or pages. If there is such a way let me know how.

Things do change....but I thought you could put in a magazine title......

Dave

DB

Put in a magazine title where? In what field?

I tried putting the full names of some active groups and pages in the interest field and that didn't work.

A magazine would have a page.

When the price of advertising per impression is zero... there is really no need to focus your target too narrow.

When you pay to advertise or boost, you can still focus too narrow but should be more concerned about being too broad of a focus.

I would not have used lighthouse and maybe went with seascapes. People that like lighthouses tend to love the sea and all things nautical. I would not focus on New England either. People in California love their lighthouses too and I don't think they really care where they are located.

Without knowing all the specifics of the ad I really don't know if these comments are valid or not.

As for specific target markets, I still think that groups present the best opportunity and they are free to join and post in and you can afford the broader approach.

I don't know if I can explain this right, but the cost of impression, IMHO is too high in part because the focus MAY be too narrow.

You paid $70 for 2400 impressions. That is 2.9 cents per impression.

I am running an ad where so far I have paid $10.62 for 2900 impressions or .37 cents per impression. That is not 37 cents, that is just over 1/3 of a cent per impression. When I get to $70 spent I will have reached 19,000 impressions. That's nearly 8 times the reach. For the same dollar. A little broader market segment but the reach is worth it to me because there are also possibilities that of that 19,000 there is a tertiary market that spend some time in the gallery looking at a broader selection of seascape and nautical art that include lighthouses but not limited too.

Again, not knowing all of the specifics I am not sure this is valid.

Floyd

New England wasn't the geographical limit, it was an "interest". I assume that this means that the pool of people being targeted consists of anyone in the US, which was the geographical limit, who have expressed interest in "New England"

When I put "lighthouse" in the field it gave me a number for the potential amount of people who could be reached.

When I added "New England" the number went up not down, so I think it's an and/or not an only/and.

Yup, like I said, not knowing the specifics I was not sure the comments applied.

For me it's like casino gambling. A fun game if I'm not losing more than i can afford. My sales on FAA are steadily declining, eventually there will be no reason to continue here unless i hit on some way to sell a few.

DS,

I used the entire US population on FB, I left it as such, no NE.

I put in Lighthouses and 22 million plus.

I put in seascapes just 1 million plus.

If you put in NE first you get a much lower number. If Lighthouses boosts it good, but 22 million?

Dave

DB

You're putting the New England in the wrong place.

No I am not putting NE in at all.


One of the hallmarks of this region, the Boston Red Soxs and New York Yankees are the two teams with the most transplanted fans. People are always leaving here for elsewhere in the country, but those fans look back to those two teams religiously.

Dave

"If you put in NE first you get a much lower number. "

If you put New England in the location field you get a lower number.

If you put it in the interest field in addition to lighthouse you get a higher number because it's targeting people interested in lighthouses OR New England.

I just tested it and that's also what the info icon says when you click on it.

i think the problem with the light house image -- is that people may not understand its art your selling and not a vacation package, which would be the first think i would think of if i saw that.

which is why i'm wondering what the best way to word that is.

i think people that are into lighthouses, visit them and shoot them themselves. so you would need to find people who just went there, and found out their images suck. or people that lived there and miss it. but i don't know how fine tuned the ads are.

like you might have better luck with a lighthouse keeper, it would be a more rare term, and it would be a higher chance they may want that on their wall. and anyone that sails may also want that nautical based image.

i have ideas for certain images to get that target audience. i just don't like to gamble my money with it. facebook can generate any random number and you would have no idea at all if people really did see it. or if they just said they saw it. unless you kept track of those images on analytics as it happens.

also the timing is important, people aren't home all the time. i assume there is a mechanism at work where it shows the time in their time zone?

i think the trickiest thing is - how do i make an ad, that looks like a thing to click on, and it doesn't look like spam.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

One man's want is another man's spam.

Spam is a pejorative only.

Dave

Mike

Since all lighthouses in the US have been automated, the very few "lighthouse keepers" left are caretakers working for historical preservation groups and would most likely be only interested in the one lighthouse that they're caring for.

Based on the comments being posted in the FB lighthouse groups, most of the members don't actually travel to visit lighthouses. Those that do will take their own photos, but most of the ones I've seen are snapshots taken during the hour or so that the tour bus has stopped there.

Hopefully the headline "Lighthouse Fine Art Photographs" that I used will stop them from thinking that it's a travel ad.

but people don't click on things that look like spam. i know i don't. so many things i don't consider spam that others do think is spam. its really all on how its listed.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

How about the "action button" FB wants us to add to the ad? "Buy a print now, don't even think about it"?

Jim,

Thanks, I just straightened out my Shop Now button to go right to what I am selling. I have it elsewhere on the page, but people need to hit it the moment they get to the page.

Your joking turned out to be a heads up.

Dave

I can't quite do the button yet. Still seems tacky. I need to get over it.

"As I said to Thomas Zimmerman above, I see no way to target the followers of specific groups or pages."

I agree this can't be done. But you can target by occupation and interests.....which you can get very specific on. I kinda think being able to target to specific groups would be a bit redundant, because when you belong to the group and post in the group, you are targeting those people, for free really. Being able to target the people who like other pages would also be wrong, if I have a successful page it would piss me off if others could target advertise to my followers. Seems kinda wrong.

You can target advertise to your own followers and their friends, and their friends that live in specific locations and have specific interests though.

Thomas

If I were able to target members of particular groups and pages, then I wouldn't advertise in those groups directly though. Especially when there are a lot of interest groups that ban advertising of any kind. One of the 8 lighthouse groups removed and banned me, even though they didn't have a no advertising prohibition in the description, and the group is mainly a dump and run place filled with images stolen from the web posted with no attribution.

I have a collection of antique tools that I'm going to shoot still lifes of before I sell them, but all of the antique tool groups have advertising bans.

There are several San Francisco groups that I would like to post to, but once again, a ban on any advertising.

Yes i've also found that many groups don't allow sales.

If it's a landmark and you tag the location, sometimea they'll share your photo. But maybe not if it contains a "buy" link.

And you should be able to target all those people based on interests. Antique tools I am having a hard time finding, but lighthouse is listed as an interest you can target on with a size of 470,000 people.

I'm wondering about the difference between 'interest' and 'location'. I have photos of places in Minneapolis. In an ad can I add 'Minneapolis' as an interest, or just location? Most of the sales I get are from out of town - people who don't live here but have a connection.

Sure....if you list Minneapolis as a location, its only going to go to people who live in Minneapolis (not what you want). If you type in an interest of Minneapolis, it will go to people who are interested in the town. Not sure how it knows that, but if you trust them that is what you want.

The biggest problem I have is lack of faith. I looked at my own FB "interests" and they were rubbish - not remotely accurate. No idea where they're getting this stuff, and if their whole database is like this, we're wasting our money.

But that's what we have to work with at this point in time. To find out if your targeting was working, you can look a the timelines of people who "liked" your post and, maybe, see if they seem like the right people. Tedious and misleading at best.

Jim,

In the old days, got this from a card rep a bit over a year ago, you would buy large glossy cards 500 for $50 or ten cents a piece. You would hand them out. Anyone would take one locally.

That worked for some folks and some businesses. Not all.

The cost obviously was 10 cents per card.

Now you can get 1000 impressions for under $1, actually well under $1, that is under point one cent a piece. If you are doing something interesting to people online it sure as heck beats handing out over sized glossy paper cards.

For a much larger ticket item, the industry standard was $1 per click, but that assumes FB negates the costs of impressions all together. You just pay for an interested lead. Again if your market as you select it is interested, you are selling to people who want to know or see or buy. Depending on the margin of what you are selling it can be worth it.

But you know all of this. So it is really a matter of coordinating it. Easier said that done. I am not finding it easy with my art.

Again if I run ads to museum audiences in NYC, the costs skyrocket, but I come up with other artists. This means I am competing with what they make as well. I come up with some high end collectors as well, but I am not offering them anything they will buy. We are not using an investment grade substrate here. I come up with too much net and no fishes.


Dave

David, the difference is: back in the day, I decided who to hand cards to. With FB, I'm paying to target 'interests' but based on what I'm seeing, those 'interests' probably don't mean much, it's just going up in front of people selected at random. At least at this point in time - maybe FB will do better in the future, years from now.

Is there a way I can see my ad as others see it? I want to see what that button I just added really looks like.

when you hand out a card you know you gave them that card, you can talk to them, and they know why they are getting the card. facebook can simply make up the numbers. they will tell you want you want to hear. i'm far more curious - - how many people paid and got direct sales from it. was it a one time thing? did you get lucky at the right time? what did the ad look like? how does it show up on the page?

i don't have a budget, i don't want to spend anything until i know what i pay for will possibly yield real results.

is a boost better than an AD? or vice versa?

i don't look at my own stream enough to see if i saw a boost. but i do stare at that ad on the right, usually it relates to keywords or youtube videos i was looking at. its actually pretty annoying, the tracking they do.

i don't want to spend money experimenting on long ads, pictures with words, without words, short ads, etc - i want to see what others have done and stem it off from there. but i haven't seen any of this data, not on here, not on blog posts.

and while i'm sort of willing to give up my money on it, i don't have really enough information to want to try paying for it yet.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Not sure where the idea of targeting groups with paid ads is coming from, but I was not suggesting targeting groups with paid ads. I am saying targeting groups by joining them participating in them and posting in them. That's free and because it is free, you can afford to take a much broader approach, don't need to worry about narrowing the target.

As mentioned above: "seascapes" instead of a lighthouse. And "lighthouse keepers" maybe even way to narrow considering there are but a handful of them left in the world of automation.

I personally think we may be way over thinking this. Paralysis by analysis. Working so hard to come up with the absolute perfect market with the absolute perfect ad is very allusive to the point one ends up doing nothing. The nothing option is for sure not going to work. That is where the old saying; "do something even if it is a mistake" comes from.

Jim,

When you set up an ad, even without activating it, you can go to the ad tab and then click on its box and then click on preview. There is a type of box in the upper right hand corner where you can choose an option to see it in the stream.

Dave

Mike,

The rest of us could not get a high school diploma or a college degree by only talking to a student for three hours. Or even by only talking briefly to the professor. We had to pay our dues and find out. Your art is different from anyone else's anyway. How you would build a market is really only on you.

Dave

Here is something else that is worth revisiting.

A couple years back we had a discussion about a member here (who shall remain unnamed) that had a hundred or two hundred thousand Twitter followers. It was suggested that because there was no targeting when those followers were selected that they were worthless.

I disagreed then and I still disagree. The main reason is that the cost of compiling that following was free to insignificant. The cost of working that following is nothing. As previously stated, doing something is better than doing nothing, especially when it is free.

This is where targeting may not be all it is cracked up to be.

Using the lighthouse vs seascape example.

If you set out to find 500 lighthouse people I think that would be somewhat of a monumental task. Finding 500 seascape people not near as daunting.
Now apply that to the 100-200,000 untargeted Twitter followers. The odds against finding that there are 500 lighthouse people in that group are not all that great but the odds of finding 500 people that love seascapes are much higher and I would even be so bold as to suggest that it is probably very close to assured.

Now let’s consider that you not only sell lighthouse art but also sell images of rustic buildings, old hotels, and similar images.

What I am getting at is if you have a broader product line than just lighthouses, that 100-200,000 followers become more valuable to you even though there has been no targeting at all when they were accumulated.

dave i know how to build a market, i never asked that.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

You are implying that strongly as what we are supposed to do for you.

We can not do that.

Any stats Floyd has or I have do not apply to the market you would need to set up.

If you know what you are doing let the ads rip. Other wise give up your crown.

Dave

Floyd,

I see lighthouse people buying a print differently.

I see it as anyone who is interested in lighthouses, not anyone who has worked in a lighthouse.

The FB system seems to have millions of people who have discussed in some way lighthouses. The problem with that is what percentage of them are photographers or more painters.

Dave

Mike, with all due respect, what it sounds like what you are asking for is for someone to actually build an ad campaign for you by posting here exactly what they are doing so you can just take their names and images out and you can put yours in it and use it.

I am not saying there is anything wrong with that, but I am not sure why anyone would do that.

They took the risk, they spent their own money, they were willing to invest in their own business.

I think everyone should be willing to do the same thing.

The other way to do it is to go to a professional and have them design a campaign complete with ads.

Or take a few advertising classes and learn how to do it for yourself.

The very best student knows first and foremost what he does not know.

I am still finding my way in all of this.

Dave

Floyd

There are 8 lighthouse groups on Facebook. One blocked me the first time I posted a link to a lighthouse image on FAA, so no member info for that, but I seem to remember it was low 5 digits.

The total membership for the other 7 groups is 51,444 as of now. Add 10,000 for the group I can't see anymore. I'm sure there's some overlap with people being in more than one of the groups, but I don't think it's more than a couple of hundred.

I wouldn't necessarily limit advertising to just that pool of people, but I would like to be able to make sure that those people were at the top of the list to see the ad.

According to Facebook, 22 million people have an interest in the term "lighthouse".

The problem is lighthouse can be part of a lot of things

Lighthouse for the Blind

Lighthouse Ministries

Lighthouse Diner

There used to be a bar called the Lighthouse Lounge in the town where my Dad grew up.

Agree David.

I sell a lot of longhorn steer images, but I market them as western images, not longhorn steers. Longhorn steers is too narrow of a target and it also eliminates the guy that says, hey that is really a great image of a longhorn, I wound if this guy has any buffalo images or Brama bull images.

Again this is what good, cookie-crumbs, tracking will do for you. It tells you what page the buyer first clicked on then where he goes from there until they leave the site either by checking out with a purchase or just leaves without buying.

I run an ad for targeting western art buyers advertising a longhorn images. Someone clicks on it and then moves from it to the buffalo print and they buy the buffalo print.

When Mike is asking for data as a way of supporting selling on FAA through ads paid or free ads/posts, he is never going to see that data until FAA decides to share it.

Yup, totally agree David S.

I would want to be in those groups too but not necessarily with paid ads.

I am only suggesting using my longhorn steer example above that lighthouse may be too narrow of a focus for paid ads.

It is just my opinion, and that is all it is, an opinion, that you may get a bigger bang for the buck with seascape.

I do not have all the specific details so I can not give a valid educated opinion just an educated guesstimate. lol

Lighthouse for the Blind

Lighthouse Ministries

Lighthouse Diner

DS,

Those may not be limitations, but opportunities. I do not know and there is no way of guaranteeing that.

Dave

"I personally think we may be way over thinking this. Paralysis by analysis. Working so hard to come up with the absolute perfect market with the absolute perfect ad is very allusive to the point one ends up doing nothing. The nothing option is for sure not going to work. That is where the old saying; "do something even if it is a mistake" comes from. "

I don't agree with Floyd all that often...but that comment right there is gold.

If you don't trust FB, then don't use it. It works great for me.....I'll keep giving them money.

dave, could you step out of this and mind your own business, yes? because i was not implying anything more than the layout of the ad - that's it. anything else, i can do.

and floyd - same thing. i can build my own ad, i just need examples of how people lay it out so it doesn't look like random spam. i don't like people assuming things, its rather annoying.

i don't care about the data from this site. that info won't help me to sell, i have my own form of data that should work. i would like the data in general, but that won't help me a whole lot.

its not whether i trust something or not. and its not about paralysis. a smart person will research the subject before jumping head first. spending a ton of cash and finding out too late that everything they did was a total waste of time because they didn't do the research first to see how its all done. they just tinkered and spent money. no i don't trust facebook, that doesn't mean its not a viable source of revenue. i may spend money there, but first i need to know real basics.

no i'm not going to a facebook advertisement class, because the chances of them doing well on it is low. why would they share secrets that work for them? they make money by selling the idea that it could work. same with plain advertising, it usually doesn't cover what i want to sell. and i looked online plenty, that's why i started this thread. but mostly i'm getting either people who don't trust, people that repeat what other people have said, even though it might not of worked for them. or just plain snarky answers.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

There is one thing I'm not getting right at the start: is there a relationship between cost and 'reach'? Maybe I run an ad with 1 interest, and FB claims the potential reach is 1,000 people. Or I add 3 interests, and they tell me the reach is 1,000,000. Why aren't they charging me by the amount of 'reach' instead of just the number of days? I'm guessing this is because they give you the same number of placements either way, by randomly picking people from interest pools. In other words they drop the same number of leaflets from the plane, just at different areas. But what is that number? If they won't tell us, then they're really asking for a faith based donation.

This is Mike's thread so please do as he requests now, Floyd and David He has said he has a set thing he wishes to know and the reason he would like to know it. If you are not going to help with that I suggest leaving the thread now. Rule one and all that. Thanks.

thanks abbie

there are basically 2 things i'm seeing:
1. facebook is so successful, that you don't want to share the dark secrets you know. and that's totally fine.
2. facebook has been a total disaster, and you don't want to lose face so you pretend you know what your doing.

that's the impression i get.


i know who my demographics are, age, location etc. i can't find things like time zones, if the ad's reflect their timezones or mine. wording on the ad is tricky - do i just explain the image like i do now? or do i have to tell people its for sale?

on groups where i post the image, 50% of the people don't know its something they can buy. but if i make it so it looks like they can buy it, its perceived as spam. and likely to be seen as spam in their stream as well. some places say you should have a photo gallery that it connects too. others say you should do a carousel, but don't go into what the heck that even is or how to make it.

some say don't do boosts, its a waste of time. others say they made a boatload of money with a boost, then gave me an unrealistic idea of how much money they spend - $1.00 a day? i doubt that goes far. some like boosts because it looks like a common post, and if one likes it, it makes others trust it more. but if you don't look at your stream, or you have other artists following you, all you might get is a like. and i still don't care that much about the likes.

the ad sounds better, its the same price, but there must be a catch in there somewhere. other than it looks like an ad, but they don't have to scroll to see it. and everything i read, each site says they other one is worse or better, without really saying why. other than saying that boosting is new, because before everyone could actually see your posts, and now boosting allows them to see it, at a price. but i can't say what is better or why.

others say they put in X and got XXXX in profits. but they don't say - (none of them say) that they keep getting more sales using that. or if it was a one time thing only.

i don't like spending money on something until i'm certain its what i want. its why i spend the better part of a week or a month researching any item i get. because i don't want to waste the money on something that is junk. the higher the cost, the more research. and this can have a very high cost.

i also haven't found how one checks things off, and what they all mean. i can experiment, i do it all the time with art, but most of the options have no meaning to me.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Jim.......keep in mind Facebook can only serve ads if people are using the service. If you keep scrolling and scrolling on your newsfeed, FB finds content to serve you. Some of that will be payed, some of that will be free, some of that will be more expensive and more cheap (Cost per impression). When you create the ad, FB has no way of knowing exactly how many people it can serve to in that timeframe, because it doesn't know how many people that meet your criteria will log in and scroll enough in that timeframe to trigger the pay ad.

Once again, you seem to mistrust Facebook. If you don't trust them, I suggest not using them.

Well Mike I think you summed it up pretty well. I have the same questions, and I'm not finding any answers.

Right now advertisers seem to be climbing over each other to hand money to FB and I don't think any of them can prove it's been worthwhile because FB doesn't give them the tools. FB keeps changing the game, so if advertisers start to have doubts, well don't worry, it's all going to work even better now so just keep paying us.

I've decide to try to figure it out on my own by experiments. It doesn't matter what 'results' they show us in terms of views, or even 'likes'. All that matters are 2 things: are any of the people who 'liked' it actually the ones I thought the 'interests' should reach? And - is this generating any traffic to my actual 'buy' page?

There's another thing I'd like to know: my Google ranking, because the FB ads should increase it. But since we can't add Google's piece of code to our AWS to 'link' it with the Analytics account, we don't get that information.

Mike the answers you seek don't exist. Advertising and marketing arent something you can apply equally to everything. I have had Facebook lead me to big sales that make the numbers look good, I have had boosts lead to no sales. I have had boosts lead to subscribers that probably lead to more sales, but I am not sure.

Overall though, when I boost relevant posts people want to see....I get more traffic. More traffic over my base conversion rate leads to more sales. Using it religiously to drive traffic seems to make me significantly more money than if I don't advertise at all. Its a strategic tool I have figured out how to make work for ME. That has no bearing on if it works for you or not.

"i don't like spending money on something until i'm certain its what i want. its why i spend the better part of a week or a month researching any item i get. because i don't want to waste the money on something that is junk. the higher the cost, the more research. and this can have a very high cost."

This is my point, no amount of research can provide the answer that this will work for you or not. It works for me sometimes great, sometimes not so great, but over time good.....but I can't guarantee anything for you. I work very hard at defining and finding a target audience to market to.

A lesson I learned from my father was that in life, there are many times there are decisions before us that are not black and white. They are grey.....and when presented with a grey question, like do I advertise on FB or not, the success of the choice has little to do with which choice you make, and much more to do with the effort and talent and hard work you put behind the choice. Pick a side and put 100% behind it. It will either work, or not work, and at that point you have more information to go on as you decide how to move forward.

I'm not expecting someone to just hand me a plan. But I think we should be able to clearer idea of what FB gives us for our money.

Take old-school TV advertising in the antenna years: you paid to advertise on a show, and you knew every detail of that show - you could see your ads running in real time. To find out who actually saw them, there was the independent Nielson rating agency, which - for a price - could give you information about your actual audience. So you might find out later your ad was seen by 50,000 people in a certain income bracket in small Midwestern towns (unless they went to the kitchen for snacks during the ad). That's because Nielson actually had some contact with the viewers they monitored - those people filled out a questionaire. FB on the other hand is trying to guess everything based on FB activity and tracking cookies.

I think Thomas put that very well. I also think he is probably very correct. In my marketing courses they ALL said that different things work for different people. You have to play (as Jim just said) to see what works for you.

Yes the basics are the same but results are not

Just found this article in my LinkedIn feed (of all places) hope this helps, I would think this also applies to pictures:

Want Your Video to Go Viral? Follow These 4 Essential Steps, Says an Analysis of 33,000 Videos


https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/an-analysis-of-33000-videos-reveals-4-things-you-need-to-know-to-make-yours-go-viral.html

Very, very well said Thomas...

Like I said, the only guarantee that anyone can make about advertising is that if you do nothing, then you will not reap any results from not advertising.

Jim, those tracking cookies and likes are the same as Neilsen. In fact, as far as sampling sizes go, those likes and cookies are based on a huge sampling compared to Neilsen ratings. Up until this year that sampling size was just 12,500. In 2018 there are going to double it to 25,000 and an additional 10,000 of some kind of specialized sampling.

And just like Neilson and traditional media, no one is or ever did make any promised that people are actually going to see your TV, newspaper or radio ad no more than FB is going to.

FB is telling you approximately how many people will see your ad no different than Neilson.

I did regional advertising for Wall Street corps like Comcast, Olive Garden (Darden) AT&T Mobile and others. I subscribed to Nielsen and before Nielsen bought it out, Arbitron was the people that we relied on in the radio business. They were much better than Nielsen. But like often happens, Nielsen now lacking competition dumbed it down.

But the bottom line is advertising is somewhat of an art. A good agency can get results even going against all of the rating agencies in the business for some clients.

Well, I didn't get a response to my question, but I found the answer.
"Where is the see first button?"
https://m.facebook.com/help/1188278037864643

Stumbled on this today which might work for some here. At the bottom of the page are links to other ways to advertise and how too course (free) to read to maybe answer some questions raised here.

I am still playing with boosting and ads I just ignore their claims of how many can be reached locally for reasons I stated earlier in this discussion. I am going to check out the courses and see what can be learned to maybe reduce my experiment costs long term.

https://www.facebook.com/business/a/lead-ads

James,

That was really interesting. That would offer any of us feedback on a given work of art. I am not sure how that would be worded to get the feedback, but it is a very interesting option.

Dave

"I'm not expecting someone to just hand me a plan. But I think we should be able to clearer idea of what FB gives us for our money."

They absolutely do, and I would argue do it better and for less than traditional advertising. You just won't accept the answers and question them because you mistrust the company.

I may or may not have said this before, but my sales are not always here on FAA/Pixels.

*Most* of my sales/revenue stream have a connection to where I live. Though certainly not all, but I often wonder if the sales *I did make* here on FAA, or any other POD for that matter, were generated from a lead, a twitter feed, a flickr post I may have made 6 months ago, a year ago, or 5 years ago.

Looking at my revenue for 2017... it really doesn't matter for me. I'll spend $ on FB promotions and continue all that I've been doing.

The *ONLY* change I've seen, is.. my sales here on FAA/Pixels have plummeted in the last 2 years (where my revenue has actually increased... a not in an insignificant sense ),
and so .... what does that say? At risk of breaking some taboo's here, I won't elaborate any further.

Cheers!

~Michel Soucy
http://www.michelsoucy.com

I was featured in a marvelous magazine a few years ago. The publisher pays to boost ads. I have learned SO much about geography from the visitor stats on this image....places I've never heard of.

Lots of opening the page...about 2700. There will not be a buyer in the bunch...this is a job for them and it was an ad page for MY work.

Take a look at the visitors:
https://pixels.com/featured/full-page-advert-marlene-burns.html?viewall=true

"They absolutely do, and I would argue do it better and for less than traditional advertising. You just won't accept the answers and question them because you mistrust the company."

BINGO!!!

Lot of that going on.

People don't know how or can't figure out how to make advertising work, FB, Twitter, Radio, TV, News Paper, I don't care what it is, so they just write it off, all of it as worthless and just a scam to take their money.

Meanwhile billions and millions, actually trillions are spending money and making money advertising their products.

Why is that? Do these people know something the rest of those that can't get results don't know? Yeah, they do. They know how to do effective advertising because they made of point of learning how by either going to school and learning or by trial and error and investing the money in their own businesses.

Marlene,

That is my difficulty in many ways as well. I can get responses by the bucket load, that does not mean sales.

Back in 2016 for the holiday season I ran the LOC Santa Claus as an ad. Fantastic results for the ad, but it is not at all representative of the body of my work.Reasonable guess people got to my AW and said, "huh? I wanted something else like a Christmas show."

I have not figured out an angle for how to show one piece of art and get the response I want. But even discussing it freely allows me to ponder what pieces might work better.

Also in the FB/Ads/Manager we can select the carrusel for several images in an ad OR to set up six different single image ads that I guess rotate as they go public. Then you need to get a feel for reach v impressions. Because, as you can guess or totally know, the ads can be shown multiple times to the same person which can increase the likelihood of response.

Dave

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." John Wanamaker.

With social media being what it is, it's hard to know exactly where and how a sale might be deemed a result of. Someone, somewhere, shared, or seen a shared post, promotion, etc.

I think exposure is just that...exposure. Same as when I do a local display/sale at a flea or farmers market. I may not make a significant sale until a week, a month or several months later as result of someone seeing a 36" or a 48" canvas I had on display, or, bought one of my cards (which I make myself) then followed or googled my name or website.

How many here display their works at a local gallery, boutique, art shop or the local market? I'd think many do. For myself, I found that folks like to *see* how an image presents on different media be it a framed print (lustre vs metallic vs rag etc), or on canvas, metal, white aluminum, brushed aluminum with/without epoxy and so on.

This is where my success has been for the most part....and I've yet to show in an art gallery.

I think the important part is, get the stuff shown with whatever tools or options available. I've sold stuff I never thought would sell, and works where I though I'd make a killing...nada.

And of course, the images have to have value, either quality wise, historic, or has an emotional connection to the viewer/prospective buyer.

And the one thing I'm learning, what worked once may not apply today... everything changes/evolves, the only thing that is a constant is that nothing stays the same.

~Cheers!

~Michel Soucy
http://www.michelsoucy.com

There are three ways you can learn to do effective advertising.

1. Enroll in and attend three different classes. Advertising, marketing, and salesmanship.

2. Hire a professional ad agency and watch and listen and make them explain everything they are doing. Do this until you can do it for yourself and then no longer need their services.

3. Educate yourself. Get outside of FAA (too limited of a knowledge pool no (offense intended). Read everything you can about marketing/advertising, both traditional and internet, then get off your wallet and invest in your business. Start putting what you learned to work and when you find something that works, keep doing it until it stops working. Then figure out something else.

However, if you are not willing to make some sort of significant commitment of time and money, more than likely anything you do will not work.

Facebook puts your ad up in front of people who are just sitting there scrolling and clicking 'like'. This is what we have to get past.

Right now I'm thinking that just putting up the image in an ad doesn't do much because no one thinks about hanging it on their wall - just 'like' it, maybe share it, and move on. Maybe the thing to do is show and image of a framed, matted print of the photo.

Jim,

Right now I am running a campaign just for reach. If everyone in the world likes, shares and buys my stuff, it would still cost me not a dime more.

So that leaves me with a dynamic if you will that is interesting. Either no one cares at all. Or the response is genuine and the possible sales are related to how absolutely loved my product is.

I have privately shared my product, it is less art related and done elsewhere, with two kids, I got ecstatic as the two in person responses. So I will try my luck.

Dave

"With social media being what it is, it's hard to know exactly where and how a sale might be deemed a result of. '

Totally agree with that but that is not the function of SM to give you those kinds of specific results.

They have no way of doing that if the site you are advertising does not supply that information back to them so they can relay it to you.

If you want that kind of data, FAA is going to have to be willing to share it with us. So far there is no indication that that is ever going to happen. Years ago we were told that better stats were coming. Well, that never happen and now we are being told it is probably never going to happen.

It is exactly the reason I all but stopped adverting my FAA site and perfect to advertise my other sites where I can get that kind of information. And I don't care how many times people are going to tell you Google Analytics does that, it does not! Not even close!

That is Sean's choice and I am sure he has his reasons. I respect that. It is his business. I don't like, it nor agree with it, but I respect it.

Google Analytics can at least show me hits to my AWS pages, but since we can't add the 'linking' code to the AWS, we can't evaluate our Google search placement, which is much more important. Given that, and the minimal control we have over the AWS layout and appearance, I'm also thinking about directing my ads elsewhere. But that's another topic.

Jim,

For the most part people ignore all of these ads.

You can look directly at that and live in fear of it.

Or

You can look directly at that and begin to think how do I get around it to some people that would be MORE, read buyers, than interested. We live in a consumer culture, people are endlessly buying things.

Either way many people will never give a fig. Which also means spam does not matter. Because it was the point for 60% or 95% of the ads you ran to nowhere anyway.


Dave

PS "We live in a consumer culture, people are endlessly buying things." I am fully convinced that Google is so profitable because as it sells advertising, mainly to the big boys, that demand is far greater than supply.

Also depends on what market one is reaching for.

In my area for example, I took an interest in the local industry, which happens to be the crab and lobster fishery.
What goes with lobster fishing? They need boats of course. Some of these boats are quite a sight to see on the water.

I now have close to 20,000 lobster and crab fishing related images, of the boats, tools, and the people plying their trade, etc.
I now get regular requests of "Would you have the ..... and how much for a large canvas?"

My number 1 method of reaching this audience? Facebook.

Then theres the other sales that have nothing to do with lobster fishing....there's the tourism we benefit from here in Cape Breton (The Cabot Trail).

But yeah....now it's no longer about which POD site will garner me the most online sales, but it IS about the *service and support* I know I'm going to get when I do have a client looking for a nice print of his/her boat, or someone looking for a wedding gift, or a retirement gift.

"Educate yourself. Get outside of FAA (too limited of a knowledge pool no (offense intended). Read everything you can about marketing/advertising, both traditional and internet, then get off your wallet and invest in your business. Start putting what you learned to work and when you find something that works, keep doing it until it stops working. Then figure out something else. "

Yup. Of the last 2 years, I see the trend, and what no longer works *for me* with less sales from certain POD sites....
time to move on? We'll see... as I've said, my revenue has INcreased, in spite of sales here dropping.

I need to look at what has changed.....then consider what changes may have affected my online sales. I already have some good ideas as to what those changes are, all I need to do now is make a plan and take action on it.

I had talked about going from a PC to a mac for a few years. I saw the trend, saw what was changing and how it was affecting my needs....then finally made the jump....I never looked back, it's been a winning move every step of the way.

I sense more change is coming for me, they say change is good :)

Right now....time to get out and so some shovelling... got a nice snow storm hitting our area.

~Michel Soucy
http://www.michelsoucy.com

Over the last couple of weeks I've spent about $60 (including FB's initial $30 credit) on ads for a few photos. My results are pretty much as expected: thousands of likes, dozens of shares, a couple of hits to my FAA pages, and of course - no sales. Oh and a few likes for my business page.

All those 'likes' were fun for a while, but in the end it's obvious that basically no one ever clicks on a link or a button. The targeting would have to be much more sophisticated than what I came up with. To be fair, I only tried a couple of subjects.

At $1 a day per ad, with basically no results, one gets discouraged pretty quickly. I could just give up at this point, but might try again if I came up with some targeting ideas. I'm also thinking that an ad should show an image of a framed photo.

Jim the success or failure of advertising must be measured over months and years of smart, dedicated work, not a single campaign.

You very well may have planted the seeds for sales in 5 people's minds....and they may not buy for years, and may only buy after they see it for a 3rd or 4th time.

I'll run some more, with different subjects, different targeting, over time, and maybe eventually build up some page followers so I don't need to pay for ads.

If people 'like' a photo but don't visit the web page, or like/follow the artist page, they have no bookmark and would never see the photo again even if they wanted to. So an ad has to result in at least one of those things or it's just money wasted on 'likes'.

If promoting an FAA offering, I'm now tailoring my audience in that it AVOIDS those areas with high shipping costs.

If this recent FREE shipping thing finally gets settled as to whether it'll be a permanent offering or not (and depending on the minimum required to have in the cart).... then I'll adjust. The lack of input from *those in the know* is a bit disconcerting for me, but as lots can change here on FAA...the same is true with me and I'm seriously looking at where my $$ really is coming from and *focus strictly on that*.

As for the effectiveness of FB ads, it's "a part of" my overall campaign and NOT designed to generate immediate sales...though of course, that would be nice if it did.
I have to say that sales for me have *never been better* overall.....the last 3-4 years has seen a steady upswing, so I need to remember that "walk-into the FAA shop" is not my only source of revenue.... where I see that, for some here, the opposite is true.

And.....I also have to keep in mind that I'm not the only artist pushing my works. Simply put, I've secured a following, and a product/service offering which works *for me*.

Right now I'm too busy to waste my time on areas that don't generate $ for me, and it's easy to see where those areas are.

To each his/her own...

~Michel Soucy
http://www.michelsoucy.com

maybe this was mentioned, i forgot.

when you boost a post - who is seeing it? is it just the people in your list (friends). or total strangers?

and has anyone tried both kinds, was there really any difference in stats?

---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

'Boosting' puts it in front of total strangers. And some are really strange.

You can target folks who have "liked" your page and their friends, or... total strangers within a geographic location which you choose.

For ex:
Location - Living In: Canada, United States: Alabama; Arizona; Arkansas; California; Colorado; Connecticut; Delaware; Florida; Georgia; Idaho; Illinois; Indiana; Kansas; Kentucky; Louisiana; Maine; Maryland; Massachusetts; Michigan; Minnesota; Mississippi; Missouri; Montana; Nebraska; Nevada; New Hampshire; New Jersey; New Mexico; New York; North Carolina; North Dakota; Ohio; Oklahoma; Oregon; Pennsylvania; Rhode Island; South Carolina; South Dakota; Tennessee; Texas; Utah; Vermont; Virginia; Washington; West Virginia; Wisconsin; Wyoming

~Michel Soucy
http://www.michelsoucy.com

Mike you can target a boost exactly like you target an ad. There is no difference.

I have never heard people talking about advertising refer to "strangers" as a bad thing. The whole point of advertising is to put your work in front of people who don't know your brand!

Yes of course we want strangers - if they do in fact match the targeted interests.

i never said it was a bad thing, i want the strangers. because most of the friends are people on here.

but there has to be a difference though, why bother with boost if we have the other one?


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Now I am confused. I give up.

why are you confused?

i'm trying to figure out the sheer difference between boosting and plain ads.

from what i understood, boosting goes to the friends base that FB hid. the boost goes to the stream, and you can't control the timing or something.
and the ad's are more exact, far more confusing to input with more choices of things you can advertise, and it goes outside the friends list.

at least that's how i understood it. like if i wanted an ad to be placed between certain times at a certain location i would use an ad. but i thought a boost doesn't have as much control, and its sort of a now type thing, where you can't control the timing.

but i'm trying to figure how one is really better than the other.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

As I understand it, a 'boosted post' and an 'ad' are both ads. There's a chart somewhere on FB showing the differences, you get a couple other options with an 'ad' which I didn't want. If I can find that chart again I'll post it.

If I open the "Boost Post" dialog (by clicking on the Boost Post button), the UI calls it an ad. I don't see any option to target my friends, which would make no sense anyway because I'm posting as my business page, not my personal identity. You choose targeting options, set the number of days, agree to the price and run it. FB then puts it in front of strangers who match the target settings. AFAIK none of my personal friends see these boosted posts.

if I might.....do not use the boost button on a given post.

Use the ads/manager.....as in fb.msavad.com/ads/manager......whatever the URL is....the control is far more robust.

Next ONLY explore setting up an ad. You can configure ads all you want till you see something you want to drop a dollar or two a day on. That is $30 to 60 per month.

The time of day for ads does not really matter and over complicates things. I would venture we all ignore that. The option only comes with a budget I think.

Choose ages gender....

Choose your regions.

Choose their interests

Choose likes, traffic, reach etc...what you want to play around seeing.......put in your bids etc.....play with automatic or manual bids.

Watch the right hand column as you set up your audiences. See how the rough numbers bounce around.

Then get a feel for how you select an image from a fan page to use for an ad. This is the third and final tab.

If you were to finalize running an ad you need the fan page post done first.

Basically using the ads manager is ALWAYS like going to a new hotel as a little kid and running down the halls, hitting all the buttons on the elevator and splashing in the indoor pool.

Dave

Mike.....

3 Posts up from yours I told you that you can target a boost EXACTLY like you can an ad. The mechanisms are completely the same. You can send either one to your followers, you can send either one to people who do not follow you, and many combinations in between.

I think the difference is that when you boost, you're only boosting the particular post on your page, but when you run an ad you can, among other things, link directly to a specific page on your website. I linked to a collection in my AW for instance.

The beginnings for running a post boost have looked to me like they were a lesser set of controls. But I do not use that method. I have only tried it once. I had a harder time seeing how to put together my audience.

I have a lot of control using the ads/manager.

DS, yes you have more control over what you 'boost' with the ads/manager. Choosing formats as well.

Dave

so if i had to guess or put it to words

boost - is level one, the beginner stage, designed for a normal person to get more likes and such on their post. its a no thinking kind of method. used by normal posters.

advertising box - is for the prosumer professional, who wants their products to be sold. it has more controls overall.

now i wonder, is an ad box smaller? if the boost is a post, where i can have a long banter, comments and so on, boost that, people see the entire thread. do i have that freedom as an AD? or do i have a single line to get my message across?

because i never noticed anything more then a sentence in those side ads.

---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

DB

Yes, that's why I wrote "among other things".

DS,

Yep, I just did not use it long enough to find out.

It is not a higher or lower level, it is simplified. But I do not know if more controls are just somewhere else on it.

Dave

Mike

I think that it's more that boosts are strictly to increase engagement on your page while ads, well, advertise anything you want to advertise.

Boosted posts just show up in peoples newsfeeds looking like any other post, which might be detrimental if the post is an ad and you hit someone who hates ads and who reports it as spam.

Ads don't have the report as spam option, only an option to not see that ad anymore and a choice of reasons.

Boosts are to boost a post. You want more people to see one of your posts...you boost it. That doesn't inherently include buttons to say like your page, but of course if they like your post they can follow your page.

You want to try to bring fans to your page...an ad is geared more towards that.

You can, however, bring fans to your page in a boost, put links in a boosted post, put whatever you want in a post and boost it.

These things are designed to be flexible so you can do whatever you want with them.

You guys are trying to make this so terribly complicated.

Here's a pretty clear description of the differences between a "boosted post", a "boosted post ad" and a "facebook ad". Scroll down to the big blue chart.
They're all ads, but there are different options available depending on which FB route you're using to set them up. It's unfortunate that they seem to have ended up with 3 names for ads when it's just a matter of what options you want for an ad.

https://www.reloadmedia.com.au/searchstrategy/social-media/the-difference-between-facebook-ads-boosted-posts/

I've boosted a few photo posts, with a "Shop Now" button, for several days each. One has now had 1,000 likes, 27 shares and a dozen comments. Fun!

And it's generated zero hits on my FAA site. Zip. Goose egg. Absolutely no one clicks on the link or the button. Same with the others. Maybe one or 2 hits at the start, days ago, but I think those were just FB itself, verifying the link or indexing the image.

have you tried the side ad yet? its probably what i'll try first.

i think boost works if you have friends that are customers who like your work. in 2014, that's when my sales slid down, and that was the year facebook stopped showing the work to people. a boost may work for some, so i might try that first, still reading about it.

right now i don't think anyone see's the art posts, everyone sees the political posts. and for the last week or so i can't get any notifications to my email, and all settings are on, pretty sure its going to gmail. checked the email again, saved it again, maybe that will work. its getting really hard to work on anything there lately.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

No, haven't tried a side ad. My first posts got a 'reach' of thousands so I'm not really seeing what a side ad does differently other than just stays there as people scroll.

My thinking was that I'd run some ads, see what they did and figure out how much to spend on ads based on what worked and what didn't. But so far it seems like they just don't work at all. With a number of zero there's no place to go, nothing to 'optimize'.

I did pick up 20 or so 'followers' for my FB artist page and I guess they now see my future posts even if they aren't boosted. Maybe the button should say "Like my page" instead of "Shop now".

It's like I have been saying for years here...

It is not about a few thousand impressions on FB or Twitter or any SM...

It is about hundreds of thousands and millions....

The way you do that is through groups and getting dozens if not hundreds of people to retweet or share your posts.

But if you are not willing to play the game the way the game is designed to be played, you are not going to get maximum results.

You can't expect much from a few days or even a few weeks of running ads unless you get extremely lucky.

As previouly stated by me as well as others. If a person is not willing to make sustained effort committing money and time, than it may be a waste of money to just spend $10 here and $20 there every once in a while.

I boosted a post with a sale during the super bowl....480 unique click through to my website. It was a good evening for sales.

Oh it was on a group too. Lots of likes, no clicks.
Obviously i don't understand click-bait. :-) Either that or i'm on the wrong Facebook.

Jim,

Usually people have to see things repeatedly to begin to want to buy it.

That is why some of us are saying it takes a consistent longer term effort.

Dave

PS FB related, my IG hashtags are getting a great response for an unknown, but longer term the response will grow as my following and familiarity for the audiences grows.

Floyd with many hundreds of CA images, you might actually like IG more than FB.

Thomas with roughly 170 images you can show them over and over again eventually. I have some 380 images, plus 20 for now sitting in storage, I will within a year be showing things more than twice.

Mike, please indulge me here, maybe a bit off topic. But I think it is something that both you and I agree with in regards to Google Analytics in tracking FB and Twitter results.

I have been experimenting with trying to track where clicks are coming from.

On Twitter, if you do the $99 a month program, they will tell you how many clicks that tweet gets. If the link is too the image page of a specific image then you know that is what page they landed on.

When you go to Google Analytics to see if they recorded those clicks, not one of them shows up. In fact, the number of visits from my Twitter clicks is higher than my total GA number they say came from Twitter.

I trust Twitter more than GA because I have clicked on the twitter ads severs times and then traced them back to my image page on my AW.

I mention this because I often get criticized for saying GA is not giving us data that we can really use.

Oh, I should add that so far one of the images have sold since I started this program. But because I used both Twitter Ads and their promoted tweets program it is hard to actually quantify the results until we get a lot further down the road. Obviously encouraged with the one sale even though it is just the one.

Of course, there is no way to know for sure that sale came from a Twitter click. With enough time, a pattern should develop it if is working to any great extent.

They have me locked out of IG with my FASGallery name and they can not figure out how to fix it. They don't even know how or why it happened.

They see no reason that I can not log into my account. Using the login information they verified, they can not open the account either.

I told them to just delete it all and I would open up again with that same name.

They say they can not do that. They said to check back in a few weeks. This has been going on for about a year now. I have not checked back in several months.

Maybe later... lol

GA is a pain to use because you can never tell where they really come from other than a single hit. like i know if someone came from facebook, because it says so, but not in the stream of users (each user goes some place but it doesn't tell me where they come from). GA oddly doesn't tell me google search words. i can see twitter because i can see the shortened url and i can follow that back to the page it goes, so i roughly know where they came from in twitter.

according to my twitter anaylitics it says i had 390 views (its not that high). and it said i haven't tweeted anything this month, which also is not accurate. the only thing i am seeing there is, i'm losing followers each month, probably because its a pain to follow people back. i don't usually trust in house stats. but google is such a pain to use, if it were more user friendly it would be better.

i saw a total of 3 twitter hits for a whole month in GA.

looking at it it said profile visits, so i guess people clicked to see my main page, but didn't really click to see the site?


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Twitter's financial crisis over a year ago might be over by now. i think things are looking up for them.

My Twitter account is perfectly good to go, but I was tossed out of their ad program. I was using dirty language in an ad. one word. Plus I think I used a name that is copyrighted or trademarked. Foolish on my part. At that time over a year ago I was out with them.

They did not have the manpower to deal with me either.

Now thought a little water under the bridge I will reapply to run ads with Twitter in the next couple of months.

Dave

I don't really trust GA either. While running the FB ads I did see a few FAA 'visits' to those photos - but GA showed nothing on those days. I'll like to have someone run a test for me - click on the FB link and I'll see if GA shows it. Not sure how someone I know can find my ad, though. Can you search for an ad?

GA has a lot of information but it's all micro-sliced 90 different ways and scattered over about 100 pages. I just want to see who hit on my pages today, and where they referred from. That information is there but it's very tedious to dig it out. GA is aimed at big ecommerce sites where people want to see trends.

We should remember that Google, Facebook and Twitter all see each other as rivals and could be playing any number of games to make each other look bad. Google might not want us to see how much traffic we get from FB ads. And it's an open question whether ads on FB increase our Google rank - I'm guessing they don't.

it doesn't see FAA (really wish it did), it only sees the AW.

usually when i run an image on a group i keep track of what image it was, and see if there are hits on that particular image, so i know for certain it came from the group i tried it in.

i have my google analytics device thingy turned off in no script, so you wouldn't see me there. i had to turn it off because no matter what i tried, it was counting me each and every time. the settings are mostly ignored there.

mostly i find it strange that goog doesn't show what search engines were used - never, not even its own.
over the course of a year, i get few hits from twitter. facebook is better only because i post to groups, but even those they tire of me or kick me out because suddenly they are a no ad's place.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I think I got GA to ignore my IP by creating a 'rule'. I tested it and it seemed to be working.

My ads point to my AWS but of course FAA doesn't distinguish 'visits' to the AWS from visits to the main site.

I tried the FB groups thing but these days it's hard to find groups with significant numbers of members that don't specifically forbid ads.

i set that up too, doesn't work. not for me anyway. maybe the fixed it. i never count the hits on this site though, anything can trigger those, and sometimes nothing counts at all.

i'm kind of giving up on groups. some are ok, some are so specific i would never have enough stuff. and none of them i can participate in because i don't know enough of that subject.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I think it's true that people don't buy wall art the first time they see it; they have to come back a few times and bond with it. But FB ads flash by people once and they're gone, and there's no obvious way to bookmark them. So I agree with people who say its all about getting people to your web site, or blog,or on your mailing list. If they follow your FB page at they'll see your posts in the future, but it's not a 'gallery' or a web site where they can come back just to look at your work

So I'm thinking a "Shop Now" button is worthless. It probably has to be "See More of My Work", "Like My Page", "Read My Blog" or something like that. And the FB artist page in turn has to get people to go to the blog or web site And that isn't enough either, because from their you need "Buy" links to a place that actually sells prints.

So we have FB that can reach thousands of people, but just for a few seconds; then a FB artist page, which doesn't sell anything, or look like much, but leads people to a web site; then a good looking web site or blog with real hit tracking, and interesting posts at frequent intervals; then on to a POD site that actually sells framed wall art and processes the transaction. Few interested people will make it all the way.

I know artists who make a living off of facebook ads and boosts, however they are selling originals, or handmade crafts, and they spend hundreds of dollars every month. FAA product mark-ups are hard to justify that kind of money being spent.

I don't boost posts unless it goes somewhere I can show a lot of images all at once (usually).

I get more sales from facebook for small originals and even mini originals, than prints.

i think ads last about 30sec to a min or so. i haven't kept track. i do wonder though,if i spend $5, and it says i'm showing it to a 1000 people (making that number up), and i added another fiver to that, will it show it to another 1000 people, or will it be the same people?

i think the biggest problem is - we have to say that its art for sale. i guess it depends on the image though.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Do we say that it's art for sale - "buy a framed print for your wall" - or are we now supposed to add some engaging text that encourages people to comment? I'd really rather do the latter. Isn't that what Zuckerberg just talked about: engagment? Or does that not apply to ads?


When FB talks about "reach" I'm sure they just mean the number of users who got their ad put in their feeds for a day. I wonder if FB even guarantees that these people actually had it on their screens for a microsecond or two before scrolling past it. Obviously we can't know if they actually looked at it or read the text, but it would be nice if it was on screen for more than a second.

at this point i'm not really sure. i avoid the buy thing when i post normally, so it doesn't look like or flagged as spam. i don't know if we have to ask a question about it and get people to talk.

so many spoke about how this change will affect advertising, but they didn't really say how.

i think its more than a second, but it really depends how fast you scroll. i move along pretty fast, if it doesn't look interesting i keep on moving.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I posted a bird photo I thought a lot of people would like - it's pretty cute - call it "like bait" And it worked - 4,200 people reached, almost 1,000 'likes'. So the 'reach' numbers aren't totally crazy.

On the other hand, hardly anyone buys bird photos no matter how cute they are so maybe I shouldn't have expected any clicks. Right now I'm running a couple of photos of the sort people actually buy as wall art. Not getting nearly as many 'likes' but maybe get a few click-throughs to FAA. It's hard to be optimistic but I'm trying...

maybe for that kind of art, if you had your name on the bottom as a watermark - it could be a brand recognition thing. not sure how many would remember it though.

how much are you spending on each try?


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I've run the ads for 7 days, it cost a bit over a dollar a day per ad.

Had my wife go to my FB artist page and click a Buy Now button, and verified that GA picked it up, so that's working - and it confirms I'm getting no actual responses to the FB ads.

i'm surprised how far a dollar went actually. i wonder if its one of those things that only work if you spend quite a bit more. it may also just be your demographic and timing of it. middle of the day, and people are at work.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I think the bottom line will turn out to be what @Lise Winne said above: the cost of finding an actual buyer on FB is so high that it only works if you're selling items at much higher prices than I am. It might be, though, that over a long period of time, one can pick up enough followers to make it worthwhile.

Mike,

Answering your $5/1000 and then trying that again the next time.

No it will never be the same.

The reason is they take the next best bid.

Meaning if you bid $5 for 1000 impressions, in the FB system if the bid is only $1.81, you will be at $1.82. You would not be at $5 even if that was your bid. Even during the day that $1.82 would be in complete flux.

By bidding $2 to $25 say for the NYC area.....you get into the FB system faster and get better impressions, higher worth targets. But that does not mean you pay anything close to what you bid. It COULD be much less.


Dave

i timed it, the ad on the side seem to stay up an average of about 1:20 minutes. which is a pretty long time. not sure if you pay for that much time, or if its standard.

where as a boost is static, but only if they find it in their stream and notice it as it scrolls by.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I thought about running an ad for a 'product' like a bag or coffee cup, because just looking at an image doesn't get anyone to click. Maybe if they saw that beautiful "Rose" tote bag for Valentine's day, they might at least click on it. So I tried embedding the tote bag in a post using FAA's FB button. It works, but the image of the bag is cut off top and bottom, you can't even tell it's a bag (but of course you get the FAA logo). So that's useless, I'd have to construct my own post from a screen grab.

it's too late to order V-Day gifts anyway. I do think that a FB ad has to somehow draw in some clicks, and mine don't, so although I don't care much for the 'products', I think I'll try a couple in ads.

so i'm trying to boost a post. i chose my ages, location, interests.

it says:

Estimated reach not available.


so what does that mean? if i spend money - will anyone see it?
i don't think its too specific.

has anyone gotten that not available thing, and it still went through? i would hate to think i'm losing the money


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I am not fully sure what it means because with all the variables of different marketing combinations.......I do not know your combination and more importantly I do not know FB's numbers behind the scenes as they match up your specs to their ability to deliver. Obviously the FB system computed it can barely deliver.

Mike for mass marketing that would make your specs useless in this instance. But if you wanted to only reach barber shops in southern New Jersey, it might be excellent. You would have very little to pay for anyway. So the bill would be low. If FB will let it run.

Dave

I might have gotten 'not available' while fiddling with targeting. My guess is it means the 'interest' you chose is in their list but they don't have enough reliable user data for it so they can't give you an estimated user count. Maybe it's one they added recently.

hopefully i did everything right. facebook is a pain to set up, and i think my browser made it harder. waiting for approval, using an ad system for 8 days with a max limit of $35 total, hoping i did that right. doing images i know have a good track record of selling. if it works out and i get the amount paid back, i'll try out a different one.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I boosted a few and got nothing. Then I spent some time starting to understand Ad Manager, finally ran an ad (after being rejected 5 times for trivial reasons involving URLs) and it's generating a few clicks to my AWS. The difference? Maybe just the photo, but I learned there are different options for the 'objective' of the ad. If you use Boost it's automatically set to create 'engagement' meaning, apparently, comments and likes. With the Ad Manager you have the option of optimizing for 'traffic', meaning clickthroughs to your web site, and you can create a post where just clicking on the picture takes you to that site. I think that's a big difference; nobody reads your text or sees your URL, they just want to click on the image. And with Ad Manager you can set that up.

I will warn you though that initiallly the Ad Manager is a big ball of confusion.

Good luck Mike! Hopefully you get what you are looking for!

i ignored boost because i wanted more control, and that estimate wasn't working for me. and FB has a history of ignoring complaints if something goes bad (as i found researching). boosts really only work when you send it right then. i don't think it had a specific set of times like i wanted.

the engagement i don't care much for which is - liking, commenting and otherwise touching the ad in some way to show they saw it by touching it.

and yes, that ad manager is totally confusing. especially since it doesn't look like anything that i read about.

basically you have to make a demographic first, using traffic (i think that's the right one). choose the ages, locations, pinpointing etc. then you make the ad, where the ad sits on the page etc. then they approve it. then i think you can make other demographic sets (i forget the name of it though). so you can do A-B tests. i'm pretty sure what i have it set up as should work, based off the stats from google and such. the age range i wasn't sure of. i chose 30 and up. since my stuff is nostalgic - and they should have both money and wall space.

still wish it was easier though, i'd to keep it all on one page - the ad and the stats. i'm guessing that after a while i'll just sort of get it - like using this site. but for now i'll see how the first one works.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

"the engagement i don't care much for which is - liking, commenting and otherwise touching the ad in some way to show they saw it by touching it."

Engagement is everything. People engaging to the post increases both your payed for and organic reach. People are over 6 times as likely to like a page and repeatedly visit it if their friends are liking and commenting on the posts.

I'll repeat.....engagement is everything because engagement means quality impressions. It takes quality impressions times your conversion rate to result in sales.

Well if it's an ad, does more "engagement" really mean FB shows it to more people?

Jim,

Understanding what Thomas is saying, if you run three ads, A B and C, the one with the most engagement is the better ad. People are responding to it the most.

Dave

What does FB do differently if i choose Traffic vs. Engagement as the goal?

You pay for clicks to your site and they feed you people that click more, I would venture.

Or

You pay for people who will engage and they feed you people that like things, I'd hazard a guess.

I just pay for reach.

Now if you are paying for clicks and you get shares with something popular, then you are possibly way ahead of the game.

If you want people to follow your fan page, then engagement will drive that up possibly more. If you have a very large number of people following your fan page you can keep them entertained and reel them in over time.

If you have a product that can sell, then you want a lot of people to see it. Brand or reach get you to more 1000s of impressions for less money.

IF IF IF


Dave

so they approved it but i set it to 4pm today, which i don't think i can change, it should have been the morning, but oh well.



there are clicks

and landing pages

i forget which i have, they say landing is better because it may be a real person and not a bot, i think i have that one set.


branding i don't care about, i think... i guess, who knows....


if i sent an ad, as a boost, to get the precious engagement, could i use that same boost as an ad later on with the engagement attached?


i haven't done boost yet because it didn't show me the guestimate. and since its a time based thing (i need them to see it when i send it), do they have to approve the boost as well? because that would mess up my timing.



all i know is when i got to that ad page and they gave me all the choices - there are way too many things there.

---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Yes they approve boosts. A boost is just an ad with fewer options.

Boosts are usually approved withing a few minutes. 10-15 minutes maybe.


---------------
~ Bill
www.BillSwartwout.com

Some of mine were approved that fast, some took much longer. During the Super Bowl I boosted a post with a photo of Minneapolis and selected "Super Bowl" as a targeted interest. That one wasn't approved until the next day.

"Well if it's an ad, does more "engagement" really mean FB shows it to more people?"

Yes...absolutely. And on my boosted posts FB tells me which of the views were organic, and which were payed for.

Facebook promotes content that people are responding to. If people are really responding to your posts with likes comments and shares, then FB is going to put it on the newsfeed of many more people organically.

so i have a general idea - have you used both ads and boost - which works better?

also i'm trying to sell a very specific city, right now i'm targeting that city and i got a few clicks. but i'm wondering if i should focus on the whole US, since many people don't live there right now. when i tried, it tilted the meter to the fairly broad category, i'm wondering if i should try changing the range or not.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I'm in Minneapolis, I do photos of Minneapolis. In an ad I can target people who live in Minneapolis, or people with an 'interest' in Minneapolis. So I have the same question. Minneapolis isn't much of a vacation destination, people aren't sitting around in other parts of the country dreaming about being here, so I probably go with the geographic area.

The "engagement" vs. "traffic" thing isn't making sense to me yet. Say I choose "engagement", apparently they try to show the ad to people who are known to engage a lot, so I get more comments, and more people see the post. But that doesn't do much for me; I need people to visit my site and look at my stuff, not just more and more engagement. If I choose "traffic" I can link my URL to the image so if they click on it they go to my site; and FB shows the ad to a different group of .... what exactly? Known image-clickers? But so far, "traffic" is generating hits on my site, whereas "engagement" only got me hundreds of likes.

Not expecting to understand this all in a day, or in a month, and I have zero advertising experience. But FB could maybe give us some hints as to what these options really mean.

Jim,

Understand it or coordinate it. Meaning if you have a few specs for a market and you want those people to go to your site....traffic.

If you want them to follow your fan page for further interaction then engage them.

Or if you want to show them an image, singularly, that can sell brand it. Meaning you get impressions for less money.

Dave

the one thing i notice it doesn't have, unless i'm looking in the wrong spot - is an option of sending it to the US, but with an interest of that town and used to live there. i don't see an option for that. i asked for them to include it, but...

i have a set of towns that sell well - but they don't sell to that location, they sell to all the places those people moved to. there is an option that says they recently moved from there, or something like that, but nothing else. its odd they don't include a way to sell to those types of people.

i'm going to try a $2 boost and see what that does. i know it didn't give me an estimate, but hopefully it will work.

now stats, i'd like to know more about, the stats they give on the ad manager are confusing and limited. they do have a facebook app for the phone, that has more useful info, like shares and such. and yet the app doesn't show me the other stats, like general demographics.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

where do i get stats for a boosted page? its not listed in the ad's manager.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Yes, boosted posts are in ad manager. You can see a count of engagements.

I am finding I need to click on my name up in the right hand corner of the Ads Manager to bring down the stats etc.

It used to automatically load, not for me now.

The stats are found in the two right hand scroll boxes. It might take a bit to figure their location, not much of an effort though.

Under the first scroll box three down is engagement. That tells you clicks etc......

You can then change the calendar to see what you have done daily etc......

I like to see regions in the second scroll bar. Currently my ad is going to the coastal states and a few states in the mid west.

I just set up a new ad, and I got a click in less than 150 impressions. Not a sale yet. But I like that engagement level on a totally new ad.

Dave

so far this is my first full day of running the ad - starting at 6am (though i may try a 24 hour format tomorrow) - i have a 191 impressions with 22 clicks..... but, i don't know what they are clicking on, since the ones i have listed have a total of 8 views between them on google analytics.

if and when i run a new ad, i'll try for a whole US, but nothing with cities, something more general.

i just don't know how much i want to sink into this advertisement thing - i know everyone pumps money into it, but i'm not really seeing anything, yeah i know it takes time.

i'm thinking that if i boost something for $2 a day, maybe that's a good way to test the waters? i still can't really find good stats for the boost. i have some stats from the app - but i want to know who is seeing it.

they also said you can build your own audience, using phone numbers and email - and FB will build a profile based on those addresses and tell you where they live, ages and so on. haven't tried it its rather invasive, and i wonder if i'm just donating email to FB and what they do with that info later on.

---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I don't think you can see the identities unless they engage, i.e. like or comment.

Yes you went for engagements. You got engagements, they fed you more engagements, any engagements by people that engage more.

There are people that will click on every single thing they see endlessly.

You are paying per engagement.

If you let it run for a few days and you get sales very cool. Then it was worth it.

The line about there are people who will click endlessly is not meant to dis-spell you at all. Because there are also shop aholics out there as well. You need to see where it leads.

Dave

I'm not understanding the rates yet. I choose "traffic" because i want hits on my web site. But i'm not being charged per clickthrough, i'm just paying for display. What does that mean exactly? Hard to dind out.

i never really got it - other than traffic i assume means people might click on it based on history. i guess boost is to just get people clicking on anything, all of this is confusing. i'm not sure how many ways i have to hear it, to understand what engagement, reach, impressions is etc.

then the clicks are confusing

we have:

link clicks - 22
unique clicks - 11
button clicks - 1

what is the difference between these?

---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

For an ad:

link click - they clicked on your image and were taken to your site
unique clicks - the number of individual people who clicked - in your case, it looks like 11 people each clicked twice
button clicks - clicks on your 'action' button, i.e. "Shop Now"

For a boosted post:
same, except I'm not sure what "link click" means in that case - maybe they went to your artist/business page?

i found one of them.

if your ad says - SEE MORE - that counts as a click, but i think a link click is poking the actual picture that goes to my page.

apparently it tells you something if you hover over the table, but its not that clear.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Now here's another problem for FAA artists: we can't put a redirected URL in a Facebook ad. For example, my domain www.jimhphoto.com forwards to my AWS. That's the only way we can do it, now, and avoid HTTP security warnings in browsers. But FAA won't let you use a forwarded domain as the link in your ad, or even as the "displayed" link under the image.

So my ad can't show jimhphoto.com, it has to be https://1-jim-hughes.pixels.com/.

This is a real disadvantage of using an FAA AWS as my main site. The only way around it would be to create my own gallery web site at jimhphoto.com and embed the FAA 'shopping cart' - or switch to some other POD that can actually host my domain. Neither alternative is worth the effort yet, but the day may be coming. FB isn't going to change this rule, and FAA isn't going to host our domains.

i thought there was a way to do a - see more, and then you can add a title there?

i wonder if i should be promoting the pixels version of the site because of that security issue.


i could leave off the see more part, and just link everything over to the https://mike-savad.pixels.com instead.


i'm also wondering if $5.00 vs $2.00 on a boost makes that big a difference. because the return on my $2, i'm getting almost what i had in the past, more or less. its nothing breath taking anyway.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I might have missed something but I found this out the hard way by having an ad rejected 3 times for URL errors - until I just stopped using my domain and punched in the Pixels URL.
At this point it's just one more thing to figure out over time.

My initial goal is just to get some people looking at my AWS site in response to ads. I thought that if the ads work at all, maybe I could get smart about them and turn them into something more than a money pit. So far it looks like FB might be a way to make a $20 sale by spending $200 on ads - or maybe $2000, won't know until I actually get a sale from an ad. Oh wait - no way to even know if that happens....

my first ad went through fine, it took like 12 hours but it worked, i wonder how the links differed?

as far as sales go, its a gamble. you might win it big and get that right person looking at the right time. or it might be a total waste of time. right now i'm the waste of time. i'm not sure how much i'll spend on the experiment. or if i'll toss in a boost now and then and see where that goes. i know others are successful at it, i just want to see a break even.

i think as a try out for an ad, a boost might be cheaper. all i know is my head is spinning at all the new stuff i have to look at. including keeping the intro short and to the point so they don't have to click on more.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Did you end up with your own (forwarded) domain displayed under the image?

I searched for sites explaining FB ads. There are plenty of them and they're almost all useless. This one helped me somewhat:
https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-set-up-an-effective-facebook-ad-campaign/

i'm not sure what ended up listed on there. the preview never really worked for me, and while i have the ad on my app, i can't click on anything.

i bookmarked these two pages:

https://www.affilorama.com/blog/how-to-hit-your-target-audience-hard-with-facebooks-boost-post

http://www.jonloomer.com/2015/02/16/multi-product-facebook-ads/ i haven't looked at everything he has yet, but he seems pretty clear. still they redid the layout since he wrote this.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

The preview didn't work for me until I disabled my ad blocker.

i had to turn all that stuff off to make the page even load.

i did notice something odd though - when i look at google analytics, and look at the page view (clicking on a link), it takes me to the pixels version of the website - the secure one. and it shows as not found. even though i use the mikesavad.com for everything. so i don't know what's up with that.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

the links start at mikesavad on facebook. then if i look at the link from goog, it becomes the pixels version. i can't figure out why, other than it seems to be a mechanism the site has. i went back a year to check on it.

i don't know if that's a bug or something new to the site. like its trying to trick its way at being a secure site.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

i decided to cancel the first ad set, i think it was too narrow an audience. i let it run for 3 days, got 48 clicks, 553 reach, no sales... and oddly the amount i spent keeps creeping up even though i turned it off.

today i'm trying for more popular images on a 6 panel set, using the pixels version of the site (secure). 7 days, US and isolating it to that one field.

the boost yesterday didn't yield much despite it being a popular image. $2.00 1 day, 173 reach, 20 clicks (i think so they can read the rest), goog only showed 6 hits. i was going to try a $5.00, to friends and friends of theirs. but then realized that boosts only go to i think the fans of your page, of which i have few. i thought it would go to my friends on facebook - am i wrong about that?

so i went to bring the amount of money down, when they showed a graph in the ads manager, showing that if i gave them $75, i would get about 20 clicks... which isn't a whole lot. at $5 it showed 7 clicks, and $3 had 6 clicks. so i went with $3 for now. i did notice something interesting. if i was spending low amounts, and added $100 for a boost, it would give me a red flag telling me this is higher than i usually spend.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

My brain hurts from trying to understand all this. I'm going to stop worrying about the details for a little while. At some point I do need to understand this deeper and figure out how to target in a productive way. I don't think I can figure that out all at once, but maybe over time.

I'm getting some site visits so yes, this is a way to produce some traffic, but no idea if it would ever lead to a sale. Until now all my sales (and they are few) have been from people coming to FAA and searching, so they're looking for wall art. On FB I can get likes, shares, comments and clicks, but are any of those people actually looking for something to put on their wall? Probably not. But if they see my FAA pages they might get the idea.

I need to see a connection between an ad and a sale. So I'll advertise just a couple of my best photos for a while, and if I get a sale of one during that time I'll assume it was from FB.

As I said earlier, I tried 7 days at $10 a day and got 2,431 people reached and 82 link clicks.

I went to $1 a day through the end of the year and 15 days and $15 in I have 826 people reached 54 link clicks.

So it looks like I'm getting more bang for the buck with the minimum amount spent so far.

and then there is the next confusing one, which i haven't tried, probably because i need some kind of data file - the catalog sales. where it matches up something in their catalog to your needs. i think amazon uses this one. i haven't tried it though, it would be nice if i could just apply any image to anyone.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

is that using a boost? or the ad sets?

i can do a dollar


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Mike

The ad set. I have it running through the end of the year so they're looking at over $340 in total revenue and I don't know if that is driving down the cost per view/click.

i was wondering because it had to be a certain amount, like a min of 35 over a certain set of time. did you get sales from it yet?


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I'm definitely getting clicks on a photo I'm running right now. I think this game is all about being clever with targeting. We have to get in front of people who actually buy wall art, meaning they're not just into art or photography, but are maybe moving, redecorating, remodeling, have some money and so on.

No sales

My views on lighthouse photos have ticked up a little bit.

Haven't really figured out how to get stats from my AW yet.

The link in the ad goes to the lighthouse collection on my AW and the image is a cropped version of my Pemaquid at dawn photo which is pretty colorful.

I only had 1 sale of 1 greeting card in 2017 even though I spent more time promoting than previous years. Nothing in 2018 yet. Sold a couple of prints a year in 2015 and 2016 with no marketing to speak of.

you can get very detailed with targeting, and at the same time they don't have what you need.

i may try the remodeling idea.

the real estate example on one page said they would localize it to a certain town. then look for people who just got married, engaged, lives in an apartment etc.... all of this is really complicated. on the plus side you can tweak the ad your running and narrow it down as you go. creating your own AB test without paying extra.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

i've been using the panel version. i felt for my dollar, i could show a number of things, i think up to 10. its tricky and a pain to use and set up though. a user scrolls through the choices.

---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

There's so much junk out there on the web about FB advertising and SM marketing in general. But there have to be a few pearls of wisdom in there somewhere, some good hints about targetting. I'll keep looking.

Another reason I thought 'traffic' was better than 'engagment': I doubt 'engagment' on FB affects your Google rank because Google doesn't even look at that stuff. But if someone clicks your ad and views your site, I assume that's picked up and boosts your rank.

while i should be looking at that engagement thing, i find my images do not attract that kind of attention no matter what. i think certain images can generate dialog, not mine. i've tried. so i'm pushing for the traffic. if i want engagement i'll use the boost, but so far i'm not impressed number wise.

i'm not sure google picks up ads, the only thing google looks at is - do you have a page at all. i think that's it. what boosts you in google is having your link all over the place - solidly (not for a minute as an ad). that's why we have that sponsor page, that's the page rank.



---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I know back links to your page matter - but I don't think the links on FB count. But doesn't the amount of traffic to a site mean something? Maybe not. But an artist has no way to build up back links unless you get so well known that you're mentioned on blogs and news sites.

If you want 'engagment' you probably need some clever text with the image, maybe a joke that makes people want to respond. But apparently something obvious like "what do you think?" is now regarded as spam.

its really the only way these days. if you were around when the net first started, everyone had a links page, but that's kind of old fashioned these days, you just don't see that much any more. if i was more proactive, i would go out and comment on blogs and get my name out there more so, but that's hit or miss.

in real like i'm not social, i don't start conversations, i don't know what is interesting to other people, because mostly what they have to say to me is dead on boring. so knowing what to say on there is just as hard. the only time i create banter is when i find something on the news. i think one of the tricks is - it shouldn't look like your trying to sell something to them, which is hard because i am.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

seems i messed up my boost and forgot to add interests... annoying.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Annoying that it takes so long to approve the ad at first but i think small changes get approved faster.

although its not scientifically accurate, i'm finding a cheap one day boost, yields more clicks then a 1 day sample using an ad campaign. but boosting is a pain since i can only do it if i post it to the FB page first.

it might be my topic that worked though. i suppose if i tried a 1 day boost, vs a 1 day ad with the same amount, i would see which works better.

boost might be a good way to see if that subject is an interesting subject, spend a dollar on one boost to see if there is any traction at all. then make an ad, which is what i'm trying now. a 7 day ad for $15 (apparently you can go lower, not sure why the first time i did it, it demanded $35). and that's a 10 panel. and why i took one down from $35 and made it $10 and then it said, no it has to be at least $10.41.... well fine... whatever.

i just don't want to spend too much to find out what doesn't work. i am getting hits, yesterday's boost of $3, got me 17 clicks with 228 reach, but that was far below their guess, but i also forgot to add interests that first time too, so maybe that was it.

still not sure if panels are the way to go or if a single one is better. a panel looks like an ad, where as a picture looks like a friend put it up. so far i've only made ads with panels, and boosted singles. i wonder if people accidentally click on a single because they are scrolling up.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Facebook has made it perfectly clear. They are only pushing out posts from people that are engaging other posts. Likes, comments, and shares.... if you are not willing to participate in those things that FB deems important then you better resign yourself to having to buy advertising to get seen.

this is weird. new campaign. 10 panels. it shows 0-1 click depending where i look.

google on the other hand shows at least 7 clicks on one single panel. now the amount i added for that was $15, and while i'm sure people do see this ad, i do wonder if they tick the number slowly if the amount you put in is low. because it looks like i'm getting hits but FB isn't telling me about them.

at the same time i wonder if one click counts once if you look at one image in that set, and if you go back to click on another, does it still count as one set?


i engage in plenty of other posts. but i also really can't imagine that every single advertiser out there is engaging in all posts. that would kill FB pretty fast. also i don't think that's what they said, they wanted people to actually step away from the site and talk to real people, they don't show videos and such.

---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

[dup]

Maybe FB's stats aren't as real-time as Google's.

its weird, because it shows a reach of 10, no clicks, yet i show at least 7 on one of them.

i also wonder if i chose too many panels, and if 1 is the best number. then again i started it at 10am, so people are either asleep or at work. i think the rule of thumb is, i should try it for around 3 days or so, if i don't get a response, i'll stop it. i think i will max the price at $15.00 to keep costs down.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I can't deal with all the fine points yet. And who knows how accurate those numbers are anyway? I need to make just one sale of an image I'm advertising - to convince myself this might lead somewhere. So I'm just putting up one or two of my best photos for the next couple of weeks and not paying much attention to the cost.

So far I'm getting lots of hits on the FAA site, so no doubt people see the image, they like it to some degree, and click on it. I also see that after hitting my AWS they may click on other images, so that means something. None of this amounts to a hill of beans, though, unless I can somehow target people who actually hang photos on their walls.

What would help I think is to show images in frames and mats. That plants the seed of "Oh! that would look nice in my living room..." etc. People see great photos on FB everyday, it's hard to get past the click-and-move-on response.

right now i have that ad going since around 10am, 27 reach 0 clicks, its the worst one yet. i still wonder if its smart to put in $50 for 7 days, then freeze it in 3 days. because its bidding based, if you have a higher number to start with, maybe it would out bid other people, and i would get the spot. don't know how often i could do that though.

so far boosting seems to yield the most clicks. or isolating one single town, but that's not ideal either.

i'd like to see it in frames. i'd like to be able to choose the avatar under the see more. i'd like a shop button (like you can do with a boost).

right now though i think is the worst time to sell. while there are some buyers, i think the lovers are all spending money on each other with candy, flowers and food. not art. hoping there will be an uptick later this week. i can only assume the views i had, were from the facebook staff.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I don't get the 'bidding' thing at all - I just ignored it. Maybe I need to figure that out next. At this point I have no understanding of what I'm actually paying for, except that I had them money and in return get some actual humans looking at my site.

if i understand it right, ad's compete for a good spot, if you have a lot of competition, the person who wants it more gets the spot. so if your spending $1 a day, and your against a guy pushing for $3 a day, he will beat you.

but if you advertising something less popular to a more isolated area, then you have less competition?

that's all just a guess, and i'm sure there will be someone to tell me i'm wrong. but its what i extrapolated since you don't have a choice of what a bid is. and the lower amount i put in, the less fast the clicks or views come in.

i don't really get it either, why is an empty reach worth 15 cents? how does the meter work? it doesn't say that. the stats are actually kind of poor in many ways.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

what's also interesting is the age range. maybe its because of my interests, but i get mostly guys in their 50-65+ range. and that seems pretty consistent over everything.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

It seems like the whole system is driven by wishful thinking. Now they want me to "bid" more, in hopes of getting more exposure, with no knowledge of what anyone else is bidding, or what we get if we win. Please, take more of my money, I believe in Facebook, really I do...

I've been wanting to try this boosting as well but I think FB is a waste of money because I have a art fan page and my personal page gets more comments or likes when i post there but even then still very little, It's taking years for my family and friends to open their eyes to my artwork so as far as a stranger looking at it forget it..LOL! FB is for goofy human stuff like animal videos ...POLITICS which i'm sick of and just stuff like that. If I decide to pay for a boost it will be on Pinterest because I think most of my viewers come from there as I searched through the search engines I find people have saved my art links on their Pinterest and the majority of the people are women. (The buyers) lol ! Also, I get more views on my twitter page than FB. So in my opinion FB is a waste of a boost.

You can pay to boost on Pinterest? I've had hundreds of photos up there for months and I don't think it's generated any traffic at all for me.

Yes, Jim! I believe you pay for ever time someone clicks on your link. Now that sounds more like it :) If you have an account there look for it . I want to know if anyone from here had any luck there.

what's confusing about the boost is - if you make a boost from your page, you have limited choices. if you edit that ad after, you have more flexible options, but i don't see a way to make a new one from the ad manager.

you seem to pay after a certain amount of time. after a certain amount of reach (which i think they just make that number up), and i guess clicks?

one or two had luck, which is why i'm trying it. i don't like the idea of paying for nothing.


i think every site has a way to pay to the top. twitter, pinterest etc.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Also good to have an account there because you can find people using your artwork or trying to resell or whatever. It;s real easy now to find out and also good to have a google plus page so when I find people using work and I can contact them right there with a comment

A boost just turns a post into an ad, but the boost dialog just doesn't give you all the ad options. I think they wanted a way to sell more ads by making it simpler. So start with a post, then skip the "campaign" and "ad set" stuff , and limit the ad options to "engagement".

i have a weird theory that i am getting less hits because i used the https://mike-savad.pixels.com address instead of the mikesavad address. both ad's i did, seem to be getting very slow hits. and while i suppose it could be that i lowered my limit down. i wonder if the pixels.com address is tainted some how. i chose that because of that security issue.

i suppose one way to test it is to make a $1 boost, same image and whatever. and make one and the other and compare.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I have no idea what to expect in terms of hits. I couldn't find a way to use my domain, which forwards to pixels. But I'll try again, next time I start an ad, maybe I missed something.

I've never gotten any traffic to my AWS from Flickr or Pinterest so what I'm getting now looks like a miracle. GA shows about 25% are 'direct', not referred from FB, no idea what that's about. If it means people actually saved the link and came back to it again, that would be the Holy Grail. But that's too good to be true.

Just do it, you'll get sales and thank me later.

lisa - just do what?

we have been posting things....

maybe you could be a bit more detailed?


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

i canceled the last 2 ads. the traffic came in like a leaky hose, a drip at a time. and almost like clockwork i had a view every 2 hours or so as i checked. it makes me wonder that if i spent $20 on a tiny demographic, if they would figure out a way to spend all of the money, or would i have any left over? its like they calculate the length of time and money and just count it all down.

i'll have to try boosts or mess with engagement, which seems to work the best so far.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

https://www.agorapulse.com/blog/facebook-ad-objective-choices

here is a page that sort of defines the different objectives.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

That link was helpful, thanks. Apparently 'traffic' is the way to go for now. Still not clear on 'conversions'. It seems to say that sales are conversions, but they can't optimize for that goal unless you already have a bunch. And FB can't detect conversions on FAA because we can't add their tracking code. That's really unfortunate.

near as i can tell a conversion is when you want to spend money on facebook, to figure out the people you want to spend more money on. or something. a way to fine tune the system. sounds like a good way to waste money.

traffic - i haven't had a lot of luck on. two campaigns, about 1-2 days each, yielded a very small number of people
engagement in a boost - i had a lot more clicks for some reason. i can't still imagine the difference.

the hard thing about these - how do facebook ads - i read in page... is that i'm selling the actual image. vs selling the idea of something using a picture as a prop. and i can't find any articles how people sell specific images. or how to word them. maybe i shouldn't say i'm selling images at all, and just present them. but that might look silly.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I think a conversion means a hit on your "thanks for your order" page at the completion of a sale. You put a piece of FB tracking code on that page and they find out about the people who actually buy, and then show your ad to more people like them. Unfortunately we can't add that code to our FAA site so it looks like 'conversion' isn't an option.

i tried a $2 engagement only, only i didn't post it to my facebook wall, i did it from the ad manager - and that was a mistake. because while it still needs a post, it can do it inside the manager. but it doesn't post it to my wall. so any reaction, doesn't show up there and counts for nothing. it said i had 12 engagements, 9 post reactions - none of which i can see at all because it doesn't show it to me.

plus i got no clicks for it.

the only thing i learned is - if you set it for engagements (at least in the ad manager) the ads go to instagram, which i can't tell if that's good or bad, but i guess if you don't have instagram and you look at your facebook feed in your phone (clicks seem to bring it to a phone), then its better to just set it to traffic.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I'm not getting it - if the ad is going for 'engagement' there has to be a way to see and respond to comments... that would be the whole point.

i think it works best if i did a boost right from my page, then the ad would be there, and it wouldn't be in limbo like that other one. i can't even see if it had a smiley face or what. i still think traffic is better. i know others said engagement is better, but i just didn't see it in the results. i may try another boost from the page itself - that might have made the difference, its hard to really tell.

i do notice there is a sweet spot for engagements which is 7 days. i am doing another one today for $10. set at 3 days it showed like 60 as a reach, set to 7 its 110. but set to 2 weeks, it drops down to like 50. even if i increased the money the amount was lower. i thought that was weird.

i'm also having a hard time narrowing the audience to the perfect amount. i finally figured out how to force it to a certain amount of money they make, but that didn't narrow it.... for those looking - under interests - use Demographics Financial and it gives a batch of choices. net worth, liquid assets? a bunch of stuff. not sure if its a good idea to narrow it like that, low income people buy too.

i suppose i could drop certain states or focus on certain states, to narrow it, i don't know what's best.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I did the same thing, Mike.

Well, someone that I have no connection to just tagged someone else that I have no connection to in a comment on my ad. The person he tagged commented "where can I buy this?" Clicking on the image in the ad or on the link would bring her to my AW, but just to make sure I replied with a direct link to that particular image.

Fingers crossed.

I'd like to try a travel photo. Brian Kurtz's post (3rd from the top of this thread) suggests targeting people currently visiting the place in the photo; his example is "Anyone visiting Ocean City Maryland now".

Sounds good. But how would I do that? Entering "Seattle" in "interests" doesn't bring up an option for people currently visiting. Entering "Seattle" as geographical area gets me people who live there. Entering "vacation" and "seattle" as separate interests probably gets people thinking about going their in the future.

its a bit confusing, i think there is a way to include and exclude people.

maybe under demographic - people going to visit? i think there is a pull down under the country area, that has different options like that. i'm just not sure how they know they will be going there or not. i can see them knowing that they were there, because facebook keeps track of where you are via the phone.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

yeah its under locations above that map - people traveling to there. i think you want recently. there is no option of - previously lived there though, which is what i want.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Thanks I'm going to try it.

At this point after a few days of running a couple of ads, I've "reached" thousands, have hundreds of hits to my AWS pages, and paid from 1 cent to 10 cents per page click. None of this generated any sales. So the ads "work" in a sense, and it's too soon to give up, but I'm probably not reaching the right people. The first think I'll change is to target people over 30, with higher incomes.

so far i find this to be a fun hobby to losing money. its all the thrills of gambling without the smell of smoke, getting drunk, or hearing noise.

i've been pushing my pixels site, just in case there is an issue with the security, not sure if that's good or bad. i seemed to get better hits using the name version of the site.

i haven't tried the income thing, but wrote it down, it may depend on the image. like if its for doctor, it should weed people out if i isolate how much they make.... where they get that info i don't know. i'm still trying to figure out how to isolate an interest of living in a certain town. i'm guess its just because its not there at all. because my town is there, but their town is not.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

i was trying to find a link on what choices i have in the interest box and found this site:

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/06/27/facebook-ad-targeting-options-infographic

it comes with this nice little cheat sheet graphic

https://www.wordstream.com/images/facebook-ad-targeting-options-infographic-wordstream-large.jpg


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

so according to that, and i haven't tried it yet, if i wanted to sell to a town, i would go to interest - Life Events - away from home town. or recently moved. though that doesn't still isolate that one town, so maybe its still back to the drawing board.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I love graphics. I'm tacking that one to the wall above my computer.

that one is pretty helpful, though long. i wish it was easier, because a lot of that is totally hidden in there, and you have to know what to type in. though there do add a hint in grey, like demographics, and then different things pop up there. still a pain.

another odd thing, i changed the wording of something i'm doing, and looked at the graph under creative. and it shows me both the first and second version, each with different numbers. i don't know if its a comparison of first and second. or if its running both copies.

also it didn't pick up my panorama, it left a white empty box. i may replace that tomorrow. i think the link is there, but calling it a stunning panorama and its blank, looks dumb.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I was also puzzled about how to see 'engagement' (comments and likes) on an ad that didn't begin as a post. If someone likes the ad, you get a notification that someone "liked your link", click on that notification and you see the ad as a post; you could now respond to comments. But the ad isn't shown anywhere on your artist page, only ad manager.

I figured there had to be a way to do engagement from the ad manager, and there is - it's amazingly obscure.. Here's the answer:
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/community/question/?id=10155082161913637

i'm not sure where that is. it seems since then they redid that site. (which is a common theme, every year the site looks different and the blogs don't line up).


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

If you all put half as time and effort into just promoting your art for free as you have wringing your hands over all of this you would have sold 50 prints by now.

@Mike I tried the thing in that Help post and it works, you can see the ad as a post in your timeline and comment normally. You have to bring up the specific ad in Ad Manager, look at Preview and click the little square icon in the upper right corner to get a menu, then select News Feed.

@Thomas Zimmerman, what are you referring to as "free" promotion? I've gone the Flickr and Pinterest routes with no results. My thinking has been to use FB ads to eventually get some people following my artist page, and then I can do some "free" promotion. But I see no way to get there without either paying for ads, or spending endless time in SM interactions.

i have been pushing my art for free since i got here. and i told myself i would only pay if that failed to work. and its failing to work due to whatever reason. trust me i don't want to pay anything and the only reason i'm trying at all is because YOU said you were making sales off of paid for ads. so far i'm not seeing this ever working out, and i see this as a huge waste of money.

so its nice to say try the free way first, trust me i have.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

how do you pull up the preview in the ad manager? i can only see it when i'm adding stuff to it (the setup), but don't see the box.

---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

"Edit" the ad and then don't change anything, just use the Preview in the edit pane that pops up.

i'll have to try it later. right now i'm playing with audience insights in the hamburger menu. it shows the demographics of given interest sets. it may help me narrow down specific locations for the things i've been trying for. like how much they say they make, where they live, etc. its kind of interesting.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

ok i found it now. who ever designed this page should be shot out of a circus cannon. in order to set things up you have to be in special tabs, and not much of this makes any sense.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Like many things about FB - it's cobbled together, gets used by everyone in the world, features tacked on one after another, and then they can never change it.

I was a software developer, wrote Windows applications for years. The Ad Manager UI is one of the crazier mixtures of UI elements I've seen. It has everything: tabs, check boxes, popups, tables, buttons, you name it. Like they got points for every one they used.

Conceptually, I see that the campaign/ad set/ad thing makes some sense for serious ad customers and professional marketers.

i like that insight page, but you can't load up your own audiences into it. but you can make your own. so i guess i'll mess with it tomorrow to see if i can narrow my audience based on that graph


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I found the easy way to target income. Instead of finding and selecting each of the 10 or so income brackets one at a time, click "Browse" and get an expandable tree of everything, with check boxes, check as many as you want.

for now i'm barely finding people to click on my stuff as it is. i'll have to wait for bracketing.

so far my conclusions are:

1. i'm probably sending the wrong things at the wrong season. i'm not sure when people decorate or what with, but i think that's part of the problem.
2. i'm also guessing that colors make a difference, and if i'm shooting for the decor, it should be the color that is in, and i don't know what color is in or when its in or when they redecorate.
3. to get people i think i have to be state or town specific. something i may experiment on later today, seeing as i'm getting no action right now.
4. money talks, my tests are $10, and i spent about a dollar out of that. then i stop it because its not getting results at the rate i was expecting it too. while it may be a soak or timing issue. i think its more like - if i put up $50, i would get a much faster result. but then again i don't know how much traffic is fake.

there is a pay per click, but its $45 min, you don't pay unless they click. so i'm guessing facebook has bots that clicks, because they don't get paid unless it is clicked on. that's just a theory though.

i think the next run will also be $10 but for 3 days, concentrating on towns themselves.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I have a new one going now, an 'eye candy' photo with some targeting. I can see right away how addicting this is. When your ads stop running, no more clicks.... gotta pump more money into the FB slot machine.

This time I chose a bunch of interests. I'm sort of surprised they don't charge you more for more targeting - or maybe they do, in some way. But when you choose several interests and demographic fators, you can never find out which ones generated the clicks. FB has that information but apparently doesn't give it out.

i have a few other ideas, one i'll try tonight. i turned the rest off. i don't get the slot machine effect, i haven't seen anything yet. more like a quarter pusher, your thinking the next one will finally push off the rest...

i'm not sure what targeting is.

they don't give a lot of info out. like i had 10 panels of images (which i think is too much and i'm cutting back to 5 again). they don't say which ones they clicked on. the first burst is them looking at the ad.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

If you choose "traffic" instead of "engagement" you'll start seeing hits on your site.

Right now i'm discouraged, pretty much as expected., so I'm walking away from it for a while. But i'm going to keep ads going, at a low level, at least for a few months.

the pattern i see is - you get a burst, then nothing.

i have to figure out what to say and how to present the next one. while i am probably giving up too early, i see them as patterns of frequency. a whole day without hits, is a dud.

i think i should do something for the weekend though, at least to get that sample. i've spent just under $20 so far, and i'm not really any closer to finding a winner.

the other thing i'm trying is - going back to mikesavad.com. i think the pixels address is cursed or something.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

i isolated it to one town with the specific interest of that town. and the system flagged me for discrimination... saying i need a manual review. they checked it and it went through real fast. but it was odd.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

assume the first 5-6 clicks on your images (in analytics) - is facebook checking on things. lately i get 3 up to 6 clicks per image.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-facebook-ads

i found this page, it shows how you should target down to the smallest town level to really boost in sales. but its tricky because you would need a fleet of ads targeting very particular people. its a bit numbery at the top, but a 1/3 way down they get into it more.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

It takes money to make money - and so I suppose I may never make money - not real money - because I don't have the money to make money with. It would be well worth it, I suppose, to 'borrow' a little bit - but I can't do that without a "guarantee" of a return that is more than just clicks on my art or photography.

i ended another experiment, isolating a town in different ways. all failed.

i started a new one, which was my first one that i considered a fail, it had 3 shares. today i had someone add it to the cart (though no sale), but it wasn't being run, and the groups that it was in are old and the images are far down. my thinking is that the share is doing the selling. so now i'm thinking i see why engagements might be the way to go here. though i did set it up for traffic. i have to mess with boosting again to see if that works.

if its shared, its out in the world for free, and you only pay for it once. i wonder if there is anything i can say to encourage sharing it.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

How to you see shopping cart activity?

in analytics, you set your goal up to shoppingcart.html. and when they add something you know it usually. if you look at AUDIENCE - User Explorer, and sort by goal, you can see where they went, what they looked at, added to cart, removed from cart etc.

if you set your dashboard to show - CONTENT DRILL DOWN and then click on PRODUCTS and add that to your dashboard, you can see what prints and such they were looking at.

if you save a shortcut to conversions - reverse goal i think its called, it will show you roughly what was put into a cart, but only the one thing, the user explorer shows the series of events that took place but in reverse order for some reason.

i also have a sessions by city as to the people that add to the cart so i can get a glimpse what town i'm selling too. of course a cart add isn't a sale, but it at least shows interest.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

You can do that stuff without having to add code to the site? Because we can't add anything to the AWS.

the site gives you the analytics code number. the rest is on that dreadful analytics site. you can do a lot with it, but finding it and translating the information into something useful is more than a pain. i wish we could add the pixel here, but i have to wait till the next suggestion round or i'll have the wrath of andee on me.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I've used the number to connect the AWS to GA, and I'm following the traffic. Hadn't occurred to me that GA would just show hits to a shopping cart page on the AWS. Well, I haven't had any such hits, no surprise.

After adding some targeting of income level and interests, my 'reach' and pageviews have really fallen off.

Jim,

You can set up Goals in GA. The AW shopping cart URL can be one of them.

The draw back is that all the goals for me at least seem to report as one. Meaning that if I use FB, P, Twitter etc with goals to the shopping cart I get them all combined as a resultant.

So as an example, goals FB 5 carts, P 2 carts, Twitter 1 cart becomes, for me, FB 8 carts, P 8 carts, Twitter 8 carts etc.......no differentiation.

Dave

For the last few days I was getting dozens of pageviews every day from a couple of FB ads. Today, it's like a switch was shut off. Absolutely nothing.

Maybe it's like some others have said - FB gives you a big blast of activity at the start to get you hooked, and after that it's just business as usual.

Trying to keep spirits up here. Think I'll go out for an espresso....

Jim,

I saw a video on this last night done by a "guru" wannabee using ads manager. His audience was very small and he was using $30 per day. But when he got a client it was for a lot of money. He was competing with Tony Robbins and a few others like that.

He mentioned that your want to find a vein of people and chase it till the end. As you can see if your target market is small you are going to run out of people to show your ad to.

Remember that if FB ads manager shows a potential market of 50k profiles, for the sake of argument, that 40k might not be online more than once a week or once a month or once every six months. Or some of those targeted you might have had to up your bid.

Two things, you are not giving it a long enough run and you do not have enough data. Narrowing your audience hurts your process of finding out what will work.

JMO

Dave

Dave, I'm far from giving up.

I sell only occassionaly here on FAA and I think mostly to people searching for a specific subject. Many times I think they're in the interior design business because when they do buy, it's often a very big print, or a set of similar images. I can't expect to reach those people on FB.

What that guy said about mining a specific vein is probably good advice. But maybe FB advertising really only works if you're selling a more expensive product.

You said "Narrowing your audience hurts your process of finding out what will work". But how else can you find out? We never get the identities of people who actually look at our work or buy it.

the nice thing about that goog is that you can go back for years to see if you had those hits. whatever that is worth to you...

everyone buys things, so i don't bother income. often the people without money spend more than with, because they want to feel rich. and the rich people are too cheap to buy anything. it would make sense to target a tesla at a person making a 100k a year though.

i'm certain FB widdles down the view to use up the money. in the morning it will show .88, then i get like 20 views and it shoots up to 2.88 just like that. i turned it off as i didn't get anything other than random views which may be totally made up.

you also have to realize the timing, its sunday here, people are out. like you would have more views at christmas and such. if i can figure out how to get people to share stuff, i think that's the way to go...

$30 a day? that's a lot of money. you may get people fast, but that's way too much without proven results. i start at $10, then chicken out make it $5 then quit because the views stopped because i probably dropped the money too much.


i think generally if you can get your ad, shared by someone else. their friends will trust their friends judgement and buy because they shared it. they may not get it from me because they don't know me, or something like that.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

His $30 per day was against a list of people in Au US and EU that were high worth individuals and had already bought something from him at times or possibly bought from other gurus.

For instance a CFO in a office would hire an inspirational speaker. So the high net worth was targeted. The 'guru' alluded to the idea that his list of targets was a more known quantity.

In other words he was shooting fish in a barrel. We are shooting fish out at sea.

Dave

After trying a couple of 'boosted posts' I started checking out some of the people who 'liked' and found way too many that were very young and broke, or were fringe-y gun nuts in trailers, or listed their occupation as "former cook at Hardee's". So I figured that I'm selling wall art and wanted people who at least had nice apartments. All you can 'select' is income brackets starting at $40K which is maybe too much. And I'm getting zero traffic with that targeting so I'll probably turn it off. FB doesn't know people's incomes anyway, I think those numbers are probably a big bluff.

Yes we're shooting fish at sea - from a plane flying over at 3,000 feet....

Jim,

Just up the age you are targeting.

It goes

18-25
26-34
35-44
etc

You can break up those brackets as well, but the reporting will be the brackets.

Dave

Yes i did set the age to 30+.

I'm running a ad with the goal set to "traffic". Once in a while, someone "likes" the ad post and it shows up on the stats for my busines page as "so-and-so liked your link".

What does "like your link" mean if it's an ad post? It's obviously not the same as "liking" or "following" my page, and you don't "like" a link anyway, that doesn't make sense; you can only "like" a post. Does it have any significance at all?

i would target then people that own or just bought a house. that should sort out the extras. i have tried to see my ad's and see who shared it and such, but i can't get the stats off of it, i must be clicking the wrong spot.

i find if i use the word history - i get older people. i bet if i use fun - i would get younger.

i don't like sorting by age because facebook sends them out to people they think it will work best on. and they could be getting a gift for someone. they may also be the type that shares it.

i think liking is just that. they saw it, they like the picture they gave you a thumb, instead of money or advertisement. the ad pops up everywhere, and sometimes it looks like a normal post, so they like it as they see it, i think. it probably means something overall, i think its like an internal score. but i have no idea how it really helps me other than facebook ranking something. and the likes can be faked with like bots (they probably exist). so i don't know.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Where is everyone's ads. Please post your link I would like to see them.
Great thread.
Delynn

One day I just swallowed my fear of rejection and just put myself out there.I put my stuff on my own personal page. I kept at it, without any boosts.....I was my own boost. I also created a page dedicated to just selling my art, but I never sold one thing from it, though facebook offered me miracle boosts. Now, I sell my work just through my personal page to people all over the world, because other people who were generous of heart shared my posts. But I want to say, I made it a full time job trying to sell my wares.

It really is a full time job Tracye.

Delynn,

We are actually not able to link them anywhere.

Dave

you can't really post a link to these, they are a demo in your own stream, or they show up if you meet the demographic.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Mike

Does this link take you to my ad?

https://www.facebook.com/davidcsmithimages/posts/1612303142138706

I clicked on the time stamp for the post, which usually brings you to a permalink.

DS,

Just your timeline, nothing else is coming up.

Dave

i see just posts on lighthouses, nothing that says sponsored. one has a pixels address if that helps.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Hmmm

I signed out of FB and the link still brought up the ad, but I didn't clear my cache or delete cookies so that might have something to do with it.

https://www.facebook.com/183299981728952/posts/1695517537173848

can you see the link at the top? should be a scrolling set of boxes. i set this to see comments in facebook.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

That link takes me to your FB page, and the post at the top is "Revisit the past, relive your youth!" with the multiple images. Is that what I'm supposed to see?

Is the "see comments in Facebook" thing how you make an ad show up as a post in your page timeline?

yeah, that's the ad. i think so, i hit that corner thing in the settings, see in facebook with comments and that's the link. i don't know if its a permanent link though. i suppose if i share my own ad, then it would show up woudln't it...

it does. i can share my own post, so now it can technically travel the world in an uncontrolled manner.


i'm trying to figure out if i should boost something - using engagement or for link clicks. i'm not really sure what is better.

on the one hand, clicks are the goal.
on the other, engaging could get more shares, which is free advertising.

can't really decide which to do though.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I've been thinking about that.

At first I thought I just wanted clickthroughs to my FAA pages, and that engagement wasn't worth anything. But then I started getting a few followers for my "artist" page and if I can build that up, I wouldn't need to spend so much on ads. And engagement is probably the route to followers, and I actually like doing it when it isn't phony. So I think I'll be running both types of ads.

what i may do is, invest $2-3 and engage only. and hopefully it will build up a following some how, and then use the same one for clicks? the sad thing is, i have the money, i just don't like using it for this.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I'm going to blow some money on it. Right now I'm getting some clicks, I see people looking at photos and even at the "metal print" or "poster" pages, but no one's buying. I suppose if I keep this up I'll eventually get a sale from FB but at 10 cents or so per click, it's not going to be worthwhile unless I find ways to do it a lot more effectively.

that one ad is the only one that i had any luck on getting people to the site. one or two added something to a cart, but no sales. i have a few bucks left on that one till the 24th. i seem to be growing in clicks the longer its up. so i may keep that one going longer. i have a few ideas i want to try down the road for later.

i think it takes a person a few times, 2-3 to want to buy something. so i think at least looking at the print is a good start. i think others are shocked on shipping prices, and or, they couldn't get through because of login issues or something.

part of this is how we word it, if your too wordy, facebook actually tells you to revise it. it should be interesting enough to want to click on it. but its hard to make click bait that goes to an image. i don't want to trick people either, and since the ad's are reviewed, i'm not sure if i might hit a hot topic they would reject.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

i've ran 2 experiments in 2 days.

boosted both but in different ways both $3.00 each


did this image, using the same parameters each time

day 1
boost - clicks only $3.00 - 1 day
8 link clicks
396 reach
413 people reached
2 post reactions
1 share
1 page like
38 cents a click


day 2
boost - engagements only $3.00 - 1 day
7 link clicks
348 reached
52 reactions
3 shares
0 page likes
1 comment (calling attention to it)
.05 cents per engagements.

the stats are different overall in the numbering

near as i can tell an engagement ad is better than a click ad. not only did i get almost the same amount of clicks, but the reactions prove they saw it. and it might have caused others to add to it. i had more shares than the other one as well.

things i've noticed:

towards the end, of both things i'm running, i had more clicks or engagements towards the last 85% of time, toward the end everything became more frequent. and the cost per whatever went down as well (though that may just be math). i think it wants you to add more money in making it look like more people saw it.

on the amsterdam set, it said i had 13 clicks yesterday, but goog only saw 1. so i don't know it thinks is a click or if they think they are fooling me.


i'm going to burn $3.00 more (so far i think i spent like $35)
same test, same image, only i want to boost it for engagement for 3 days spending $1.00 a day. and see if by spreading it out i get the same results.

i did notice that the $3.00 they recommended claimed they were going to give me 860-2300 reach - and neither came close, so that value is totally useless. for me anyway. i also noticed that when i went to boost again, it recommended $6.00, and filled it in for me, even though that was never one of the choices, i thought that was odd.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

that was strange, till now it was 1 day, automatically filled in. oddly it filled in 3 days on its own. i wonder if i said 5 days here on this site, if it filled in 5 for me? it also said $6.00, removed the option for $3, i had to do that myself. and even though this is the 3rd time running the same set, it didn't have an guestimate for the $3.00 amount.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I've run a few boosts and ads for a couple of weeks. My conclusion is that it doesn't matter what sort of ad it is, 'boost', 'click', 'engagement' or whatever, because there are only 2 end goals: either get people looking at my photos on FAA or get them 'liking' my FB page. If they don't do one of those things, it doesn't matter if they like the post or comment on it, because it's gone, they'll never see it again. Even if they share it, their friends might see it once. It's all just a fireworks show, then poof, it's over.

I've 'reached' thousands, gotten hundreds if not thousands of 'likes', hundreds of page hits on my FAA site, Some people get to my FAA page, then look at a few other photos. Sometimes they click on metal print, or canvas. But no one buys anything or even puts it in a cart to check shipping.

So far my conclusion is that Facebook people are just sitting there looking at things and clicking on them - and then oh look, here's a funny video. I could do this all year and not generate any sales. I suppose if I got a sale tomorrow, I'd be more optimistic.

results from day 1 of a 3 day experiment is going pretty much how i expected it to:

i'm getting about 1/3rd the hits i had with the 1 day.

so my conclusion is - its not the length of time its up, its the initial amount you put in. so i'm thinking, if i put in $50, for a 3 week, it would give me rapid results. they would burn the money quickly, but i could stop it at any time. instead of going with a lower amount and letting it ride. but i don't want to experiment with that much, no matter what they will give you what you want to see. the amount will always be spent, even if your charged more per whatever.

i may try a few other things on an idea i have. but i don't see how people are doing this. i think it would really help if we had the ability to have that pixel thing.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

It's some sort of bidding system, right? I totally don't get that part. Like a silent auction of a sealed package - you don't know what you're really bidding on, or what others are bidding.

its sort of like this - if i'm getting it right.

i have a picture of NY, and i'm sending it to certain people, and so are you.

you put in $5 total.
i put in $20 total, i want my stuff to totally be in front of your stuff. so i can offer more. the ad might be worth 20 cents, so the system will say, mike wants it for 50 cents, and i get the ad. i can even change the bid to any amount (they started it at $2.00)

i think the system is nuts and i think its all lie anyway.

like i looked at the total clicks i got from a week long ad i ran, on certain days they said i had 13 clicks, but goog only saw 1. so i think all of that is a lie. engagements are easy, all they have to do is like it, and you have the proof right there.

i may try one more week long on items that have sold in the past. i'll isolate to those that have money and such, and see how it goes?


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

The bids are in constant flux. You get the next highest bid by some fraction of a cent. You can cap how high you will let that go, but then you sit on the sidelines very often.

Usually what you pay is less than expected.

Dave

Mike,

Not only will your bid get the first priority, but with that priority your actually amount paid will be lower. You get in line first for a slot even though Jim in your example bid less he is last in line paying the higher price for the next slot with prices of bids rising. Or Jim is locked out when the bidding process goes over his cap.

Dave

W-a-a-a-y too complicated. I also have no trust that it's honest or makes sense.

It is what it is.

If you ever get past the trust thing, you need to know how to take advantage of using the system.

I am getting there.

Dave

Well ok it's simple: give them more money and your ad might get seen by more people. Maybe. Depends on other things you can't see or control. It's up to you, kid, you wanna play or not?

Actually, though, this isn't my real issue. I paid a few bucks and got lots of ad views, likes, shares, and even hits on my FAA photo pages. I'm talking hundreds of FAA page views on one photo in particular, over a few days. But none of these FB people even come close to buying anything. They just look, like, click, look at my FAA page, hit the 'back' button and move on.

So, at this point, the value of FB advertising, to me, is zero, regardless of the amount of traffic. If I ever actually get a sale or two from FB I'll think about it some more. I can't compute the value of nothing.

before i dump more money in, i'm going to try 1 day $1.00 ads and see how far it gets me. i'll make a set a day because they take so long. once set up i can feed money into it. still trying to figure out if clicks are better than engagements or vise versa.


facebook will figure out a way to spend your money one way or another, even if each view ends up being a $1.00 each.

i do find that the amount of interest drops off after about 4 days. so anything more than that may be a waste of time. i also can't narrow the audience so its in the center - unless i isolate a town.

also looking for an interest that says - i'm redecorating. you would think that would be an option. i am curious how much a person spent there till they got a sale. i don't know if its just a saturation thing or not. but even that's hard because i have so many topics.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

when facebook reviews the images you will automatically get 3 views each.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Actually the 2 images I have in ads have been getting about the same number of clicks every day for a couple of weeks. Cost is now at 11 cents per click. Hundreds of visits to the AWS pages.

Now here's the weird thing: on FAA's stats page, I see lots more visits than are logged by GA or Facebook's Ad manager. So, many of them are now coming not to the AWS page but to the main Pixels domain. No idea why that's happening. Now if someone would just buy a print, things would get interesting.

Bump...

-YoPedro
Twitter@YoPedro

so far i have no luck. i'm experimenting with town isolation. i've wasted around $50 now. i think i limited to wasting $100. i could probably afford more as long as i convince myself its working, and that i'm not really spending much on gas since i left my job years ago. technically this money would be for that.

i'm also now ignoring link clicks/traffic. i get very few hits. at least with engagement i get some clicks, and hopefully shares. if i keep engaging the same one over and over, i can build up a popularity rating (likes, shares etc), which might make it seem more popular. doing a weekend test, seems the most active.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I'm running 2 ads at $1 a day each, and I get dozens of page visits per day. Sometimes a visitor will look at a bunch of other photos on my site. No one buys anything. Maybe twice has someone even hit the shopping cart page.

About 90% of these clicks come from phones, and I really doubt anyone buys wall art while killing time looking at FB on their phone. And even if they see something they like, by the time they get home they've forgotten about it, or have no way to find the ad again.

I'll keep this going for a while, who knows, maybe I get a couple of good sales and all of a sudden I'm at break-even with FB. But after about a month it's looking like it won't produce anything except page hits.

i'm still wondering if there is a difference between a boost
and a power manager engagement ad.


i know they are the same, but i wonder if they are prioritized differently. i seem to get more "stuff" when its a boost, compared to an ad set. but i can only make a panel ad in the power thing so i guess i'm stuck with it.

in general i'm not even getting hits. spent a few bucks figuring a dollar a day should be enough to give me and idea, but not really. i'm spending $5 for today to monday.

looking at today's experimental, which i have turning on at certain times of the day started a few hours ago, i have 16 reach with 1 click. so its sort of encouraging.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Even if you could figure it all out, they'd change it the next week.

I don't even care about the numbers at this point. I'd just like to see even one actual sale generated via a FB ad, then I'd get more serious about it. Doesn't matter if I get 1,000 clicks, if they're all just people who were staring at FB while waiting for a bus.

me to, but i'm spending a lot more than i wanted too. it just also might be terrible timing. at christmas, spring cleaning etc - that may be the right time.

i had a sale last night of something i advertise, and i'm thinking - yes i did it, finally. but it wasn't a sale in my mikesavad site, and it wasn't from the US, it was from canada, a sale is a sale, but would have rather it from something i paid for.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

It's a drag that people can't 'like' or comment on an FAA photo without creating an FAA account. No one wants to create accounts all over the place, anymore. Many if not most sites now let you comment using your FB identity.

what's more of a drag is that if someone likes your post, sometimes you can't see who it is. its marked private for some reason.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I tried a $10, 3 day boost post ad for a fleece blanket in early December. I got over 900 views, only 6 clicks, and no sales.

-James
http://www.montereypeninsula.info

"Do or do not. There is no try." - Yoda

The "My Pillow" guy buys up remnant space on every media outlet because he has a product that every one can use - a good nights rest and he has a huge profit margin. As long as he makes enough sale during that 30 seconds to cover the costs plus $1, he'll keep running the ad.

If you spent the time ad money to tested ads and target market until you found the right combo that brought in results (after thousands of dollars), you'd take out a loan to run the ran as much as possible, because in the end it was bringing in positive cash flow.

Running a starving artist type ad campaign of a few dollars is like tossing your money in a slot machine or buying a scratch ticket but will less of a payout potential.

one thing i learned is about a bug they have, which i'm hoping they will fix. if you narrow the audience - in that it MUST match something, only choose 1 thing. i find if you ad more than 1, the top box (where it finds anyone of those things), and the MUST match - switch places.

so i've been getting few hits because it messed it up. and i don't know why i bother even saving profiles if i can't load them into anything. there is no place to load them. i had to correct it twice today. hopefully i'll get the hits i deserve. so many bugs in that place.


i've tried free ads for a long time, and i have results. i figured if i tried paid advertising maybe i can make more sales? so far that hasn't happened and probably will never happen. maybe at christmas.

i wouldn't even call it a slot machine, because with those i can at least line up my lucky troll doll collection (more like voodoo dolls), of which i can blow on their hair in a certain order and that will then send luck my way, via extracting the luck of the victims. this is more like one of those quarter pushing games. where you accidentally fall into the right place and quarters come out. but you don't know what you did to get it, and it doesn't always work.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

It's like trying to hit a diving hawk with a spit wad.

Consider the whole concept of advertising. Car manufacturers and drug companies blanket the news with ads because their products have wide appeal and high profit margins that can absorb the costs.

They build up brand awareness over time with consistent messaging.

They know most people seeing the ads are not currently in the market for a car. But when they do shop for a car, they want to have their dealership top of mind.

This strategy requires long term bombardment of messaging.

Most little guys playing around with FB just buy a few dollars trying to hit someone in the exact moment they are looking to buy art. What are the chances you'll hit the right person at the right moment? Slim.

And branding requires lots of investment. It's something to be left to the mothership rather than individuals trying to create enough branding to overcome the competition.

James results show 6 clicks for $10 or $1.60 per click.

So what is your conversion rate? You'd be lucky if it was 2%. 100 clicks would cost $160. So hopefully you end up with something more than two phone cases.

Ideally if you made a return of $161 on the investment ($1 profit), you'd keep going. Less than that and you are just losing money.

that's how i always felt, i don't have the money to really pump into it. so i'll try this last experiment before trying it more on a gift buying season. someone on here spent like $100 and got $3000 in sales. but it won't be me i guess.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

My other thought - just in general - is if you don't have a distinct portfolio of artwork that stands out, you really are wasting your money.

You have to be selling something with unique selling proposition. A portfolio of random photos isn't something that is easy to market.

Best case is having a product line with a distinct target market. Some like Hot Rods - then you can target hot rod enthusiasts. Or nursery room art and you can target pregnant women.

.....

A good example is this guy who did a series of graphic posters of lighthouses up and down the New England coast. He advertised in Yankee Magazine, Downeaster and in local coastal towns. Also got a lot of local press as he was doing a subject of interest to the locals. He knew his target and where they hung out.

I honestly don't have time for Facebook. Facebook use is also dropping. I and most people I know get tired of getting on there and all you see is someone complaining / negativity, or it's the same people everyday that posts everything from what they eat to where they are. I get tired of it. When I am on there, it's usually to post something, wish someone a happy birthday, or quickly scroll through a couple pages maybe every other day or so. Even when I post something on my photography page, it doesn't always show up on my followers news feed (shoot, it doesn't even show up on my news feed when I'm logged into my personal account). Which comes to another point I don't like about facebook. It only shows post from those it thinks you want to see. So if you don't visit a page very often, then it rarely shows up on your news feed. I haven't found a way to do this on mobile site, but on the computer site, I usually always have to change feed to most recent in order to see everyone (those that don't post often don't show up unless I do this).

Ask yourself: what do you do when you see an add pop up? Do you stop to read and look at it? Do you click it? I scroll through because I don't have time. Rarely ever do I click on an ad. Last I heard, they count those that scroll quickly through as a view even if only on screen for half a second. I'm in marketing and most people I talk to don't pay any attention to those ads. That's not to say it doesn't work, because it works for some types of businesses, there can just be a lot of waste so I don't bother with it.

Someone up above mentioned car companies running ads.

GM has been back and forth in 2012 and 2013. In 2012 GM declared FB ads were worthless. GM was back in 2013.

Dave

you don't get a pop up. its either in the side screen, or its in your stream, it looks like any other post. and if it catches your eye you might click on it. and people have.

---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

that was back in 2012, times changed since then. i can't say they are useful though, but i can't agree with them. it really depends how they used it, and if anyone likes their cars.

---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

I would guess GM went back to it because they want to sway an entirely new generation to their products. Branding.

The budget that was killed back in 2012 was $10 million. I do not know the new budget.

Dave

Well yeah, if you look at it logically, it's hopeless. The average small-time artist or photographer can't pony up thousands for an ad consultant.

This is just a game we play, because we're getting buried in FAA as 10,000 new images come in every week, so our sales are drying up and we don't know what else to try.

Currently have an ad set with $20.00 budget for 2 week period. Photo links back here to FAA. 483 people reached, 130 engagements, 10 photo clicks, 6 shares (2 by me), and 1 new page fan. No sales.7 days left. $6.33 spent so far. Thought I would give it a try after reading comments in this thread.

So far, out of the thousands of people who supposedly "saw" my photos on FB, a couple hundred liked one well enough to click on it and find out more about it. Some of them looked at other photos, too. It might be that 1,000 people, on average, will look at a photo on a POD site for ever 1 that actually buys a print. . So eventually, if I keep this up, I'll probably get a sale - but who knows how long that would take or what it would cost?

So FB advertising "works", but it's just way too expensive for the product I have.

so far the experiment is failing. and its also showing the sheer amount of bugs facebook has. i set limited hours, specific town, a selection of interests, and one narrowed interest.

no matter how many times i edited it, to not narrow it down to many people, anything extra in the first box, ended up in the second box making it very narrow. this seems to happen on a duplicated ad, and i only duplicate because its a pain to make another 10 panel ad.

also, once i removed that, i removed my custom hours, and said - post it any time. and then the meter went from - i'm fine with your selection to - less than 1000. even though i opened up the field to more people.

i'm not impressed at all with this. its confusing and unprofessional. either the estimator is broken, or that meter is linked to who they are showing it too, and i'm not getting hits because of that. i just don't know.

it seems i get more hits on a boost with a single image then i do with a panel. and each time i copy one that i made, i get less hits. right now i may just give up. i'll burn the $5.00, i took out my custom towns don't know if that was a good idea or not. all i know is the reach was very low. i think they make up these stats as they go.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

If you spent thousands of dollars, systematically tried different strategies, kept detailed day-by-day records, and made enough sales that you had some data to work with, you MIGHT figure out how it works, more or less, at least until it changed again. That's not an option for most of us. All I can do is try running a few ads for a long time (meaning I "bid" a small amount) and generate a trickle of views to my site, and maybe something comes from it over time. I do see a few 'repeat' visitors.

"If you spent thousands of dollars, systematically tried different strategies, kept detailed day-by-day records, and made enough sales that you had some data to work with, you MIGHT figure out how it works"

Yup, or you could find an expert that does this for a living and already has that data and spend $200-$300 and go sit down with them and they will probably give you a lot of information that will go towards learning to do it for yourself.

Kind of like buying from a professional photographer that creates first-class art to hang on your wall or taking your iPhone images to Costco and hanging your own "snapshots" on your wall.

You guys are on the right track and I applaud you for trying and staying at it. But your sampling sizes are just not large enough and you have not been at it long enough.

I totally understand the affordability aspect. I get that. But you are dealing with numbers that are just too small. If it was as easy as getting one sale for even every 10,000 impressions, everyone on FAA would be millionaires by now.

To run a good sampling I would try to reach 100,000 impressions ten different ways and then you got a decent sampling.

i've looked up people that share that for free, but once they start comparing AB tests with clicks per that and a lot of jargon, my brain vomits.

in order to get that many impressions i'd have to plunk down a good $1000 a month - maybe... and then i might hope for a small sale. the problem with art is, it has to appeal to the person, they should want art in the first place. its not like selling a stethoscope to doctor, where i could pin point just those people, who want that one thing. but art is a bit different. how to sell the art without saying that the item itself isn't for sale.


---Mike Savad
http://www.MikeSavad.com

Floyd never said 100k impressions in one month.

Dave

Find me that knowledgeable FB marketing guru who will work 100% on commission, and I'll start with him tomorrow.

I don't think you would have to spend $1000 but I do expect you would have to do $300 for a long-term program that would work for you. Or find some level of success on considerable less like Thomas Zimmerman and others have done.

Yup, that is why I am saying to go sit down, face to face and be willing to pay someone that can explain it to you so you can understand it. But you really only need to understand what it is you need to know to make it work for you.

Kind of like driving a car. You don't need to understand the total concept of the internal combustion engine to get your car to do what you want it to do for you.

Most of the people that are giving you something for nothing are usually only giving you enough "nothing" to get you to buy something.

The other important element that has not even address is just exactly what and how the ads or posts are structured.

I have changed the results by tenfold on direct marketing ads by changing just a few words. And this is direct marketing. That is something else the pro should be able to help you with.

Jim, you will continue to reap the rewards in direct proportion to how realistic your expectations are.

If you think you should get a sale for every 1000 impressions and that is the reality of the marketplace, then you will.

If you think you be able to get someone to work for you on the basis of commission and that is the reality of the marketplace then you will.

My question is, how is that working for you so far?

No one that is any good has to work that way. That is the reality of the marketplace.

And the other question is, why would want to use someone that has to work that way when it is not the norm in the marketplace? That kind of suggests to me that they are not very good at what they do.

Coincidence, I just went in and changed up my wording.

Dave