Sean Blanda

If you’re in a hurry, I’ll sum up my experiment with Facebook ads in the words of my brother: EPIC FAIL.

As a part in my endless experiment with the workings of the Internet, I pondered ways to increase the RSS subscribers to Consumer Whore, a little side project I have.  Consumer Whore features something cool to buy everyday.  On the surface, if CW were to refer waves of people to purchase an item there could be a potential for money via affiliate ads, sponsored posts, and display advertising.  So far, the growth of the blog is on par with its age.  After a month of being live, there are 8 RSS subscribers (5 of which I personally know).  The daily stats:

CW posts every weekday, so the stats dip a bit every weekend.

The Plan

I set off to take an ad out in Facebook.  I have had limited (but successful) experience with this, and wanted to try again.   On the days I was going to have the ad display, I wanted to make the item of the day an affiliate link.

An affiliate link is a link to a retailer’s product.  If you refer them a user that eventually results in a sucessful sale, you receive a percentage of that sale.

Theoretically, this would drive more traffic than usual to the blog on a day where the most prominent item could make me some money.  I still had a Commission Junction account from my College v2 days, and signed up to be a part of the Love Sac affiliate program.

I chose Love Sac, because a few of my friends have them and all love their … um … sac.

Placing the Ad

Since the last time I tried to advertise on Facebook, they have upped their advertising system so your target demographic can be extremely narrow.  I choose people between 18 and 28 years old in the United States who have listed “shopping” among their interests.

However I failed to note an obvious flaw with Consumer Whore: It has the word “whore” in the title putting up a red flag in any profanity filter.   My first ad I submitted was this one:

In my infinite genius, not only did it have the word “whore”, but also “sucks”, “sexy”, and “love sac”.   After receiving Facebook’s rejection letter (”The text may not contain, facilitate or promote offensive, profane, vulgar, obscene, adult or inappropriate language.” –Whoops) , I created a new ad … that got rejected for “excessive or incorrect capitalization.”

Finally I settled on the ad below:

The numbers

I paid 62 cents per clickthrough for a max of $25 per day.  The ad ended up running for one and a half days.   The stats for Facebook are below:

As you can see, the ad had a terrible click through rate (CTR).  I’m still new to the online ad game, but my hope was for 1%.  In my mind, this means my ad copy stunk.

However, it’s not necessarily the CTR rate that affects me.  The CTR more affects Facebook as they could have had an ad with a higher bid in place of mine, and made more money than they did from me.  What matters to me is how many people click through to my site and then (hopefully) to my affiliate link.  As you saw from the stats in the first picture, there was not a noticeable spike on the days the ad ran.  Granted, traffic did increase, but it was just as high as any other “random” spike in the days past.

The affiliate link traffic was absolutely terrible with only ONE person clicking on the link.

So to recap:

Money spent: $32.42
Increase in traffic: negligible
Affiliate link clicks: 1
Revenue IF that one person purchased the product: ~$20 (10% of a $200 sale).

After having a few days to stew think about this, I think the following rules should apply to my next ad buy:

1. Don’t mention the name of the site.  No one cares.  If they click, they are interested in the product
2. I should research the most likely demographic to purchase items under $200 on the Web.  Just assuming people who had “shopping” as an interest would be ideal was lazy.
3. Pick a product with a less unfortunate name.

I hope to have a better story to tell next time!