Pinpoint Parachute Marketing

According to Facebook’s statistics, my five-day ad campaign — for which I budgeted a whopping $25 — achieved the following results for Pinpoint Parachute Marketing:

• It displayed to 19,817 individuals an average of 3.3 times

• It was clicked on a total of 9 times for a click through rate of .014% (You get the CTR by dividing the number of times the ad was clicked on by the number of times the ad was shown.)

A .014% CTR is pretty bad. Nine clicks in 5 days is really low. And I can add to this lackluster report that so far none of the nine people who clicked through to my site has contacted me for work. But there was some good news. I only spent $15.79. And I learned something important.

I received the most traffic to my site on the one day I made my only tweak to my campaign strategy.

The one important strategy tweak I made was to narrow my target audience from the ridiculously broad entire US to one city: Nashville. I chose Nashville after discovering it was #3 on a list of the “10 Growth Cities Small Business Owners Should Know About.“  (Small businesses are one of Pinpoint Parachute Marketing’s target audiences so advertising in a place attractive to them makes sense.)

I figured everyone in the article’s #1 boom town, Austin, was likely still discombobulated by the terrible recent fires in Texas, and that city #2, Raleigh NC,  probably has a surfeit of technology companies that do what I do. So, Nashville it was, and electing to have my ad displayed only to people living there changed the target demographic as follows:

The day I made that change, my site received 38 views, easily 7 times better than on any other day the ad ran. So, now I’m left wondering what the results could have been had I continued tweaking this focus, moving to other cities on the Top 10 list, and perhaps changing my ad copy to include the city name so that people in, say, San Antonio (#4) would be more inclined to think my service has something to do with them.

Unfortunately, after the single improvement I made, I fell prey to one of the most common online advertising mistakes: setting up a campaign, funding it, and forgetting about it. And I even know better! Luckily, I had a tiny budget of $25 invested so my inattention didn’t do much harm. But it didn’t do me any good, either.

Because that’s the thing about online advertising, whether pay-per-click, pay-per-impression, or some other model…Reaping the benefits to be had requires paying close attention to an ad’s metrics and course adjusting accordingly. And you can’t do that if you only check your performance once a week.

I’ve created and managed Google Adword campaigns for clients on a number of occasions, but two things prompted me to give Facebook Ads a try:

1. there are soon going to be a billion people using Facebook
2. people on Facebook are in a more receptive “make a connection” mindset than people using a search engine.

At least that’s my gut.

When I search on Google I’m on my way to someplace else. Google’s just the pass through and I may or may not slow down to notice the targeted ads it displays. But when I’m attending to my Facebook News Feed, I linger. I’m in the company of family and friends with no place I’d rather be.  I’m hanging out, and those ads with images on the right side of my page tend to catch my eye.

So, this week I’m running a Facebook Ad for Pinpoint Parachute Marketing. Budget: $25. Duration: 5 days. Let’s see if my ad produces any results whatsoever on such a small investment.

I selected the following criteria for when it should be displayed. I’m starting broad knowing that I can narrow my focus. Facebook tells me:

This ad targets 1,327,960 users:

The hyperlinked ad looks like this:

I chose to pay for clickthroughs instead of impressions because I’m more interested in engaging people on my site than building brand awareness.  I’m starting with a bid limit of $2 a clickthrough.

Update on results to come…

(About Facebook Ads)