Archives – June, 2011
The 0.1% Rule
There are two ways you can pay for ads on Facebook: pay per click or pay per thousand ad impressions. Pay per click is paying a fixed rate you agree to with Facebook when you create each ad and you pay it every time someone clicks your ad. Often you’ll pay less than your bid for a click, depending on the competition with other ads and their click bids that also seek your target prospects when your ad is clicked. An ad impression is your ad appearing once on one of your target prospect’s screens. If you run ad campaigns for a few days with either payment method Facebook keeps track of your Click Through Rate (CTR) regardless of what payment method you use.
If you find over time your Click Through Rate is 0.1% then that means for every 1000 times your ad appears one person has clicked it once on average. So if you had paid 50 cents per click it would have cost the same as paying 50 cents for 1000 impressions. So the amount you pay per click when you have a 0.1% average Click Through Rate is the same as what you’d pay for 1000 impressions. (more…)
June 29, 2011
Once you’ve specified all the criteria for your ad you’ll then be asked how much you want to pay per click. Facebook will suggest to you a range of prices to pay ($X minimum to $Y maximum). Facebook would have you believe that you need to bid within this range to be competitive and have your ad seen. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean if you bid below the minimum that you’ll get little or no traffic to your website because your ad won’t be displayed. After all, Facebook’s main source of revenue is these ads, so it’s not in their best interest to advise you start your campaigns at a nominal amount per click. (more…)
June 27, 2011
Use Ad Posting Automation Software
Posting and updating lots of Facebook ads is very time consuming. So there is third party software available specifically designed for Facebook allowing you to post large numbers of nearly identical ads (eg. the ads can differ only by your bid for each click). This will allow you to achieve the goal of having Long Tail marketing and save you a great deal of time and money by enabling you to manage hundreds or even thousands of ads. It’s important you clearly understand the concept of Long Tail Marketing to be successful at Pay Per Click marketing. For more information on what Long Tail Marketing is visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tail.
As of 2011 many PPC companies offering this software have very high minimum monthly spends – often $10,000 or more. One company we’ve found offering this software with no minimum monthly spend is Pay Per Click Coach (http://www.ppc-coach.com). They currently charging 5% of your monthly Facebook ad spend along with a $50 per month fee to access their many Pay Per Click resources. We anticipate in the near future that as more companies enter the Facebook marketing field that high (or any) minimum monthly advertising spends will disappear, and paying companies a % of your Facebook ad fees will disappear not long after that. (more…)
June 24, 2011
The key difference between Facebook and Google for real estate professionals is that people may or may not be very interested in buying or selling real estate in the near future who are on Facebook and see your ads there. But if they find you through Google then you can be sure they specifically went looking for what you offer and found you using keywords related to the home they’re looking for. Consequently, people who find you through Google tend to be more serious about buying or selling real estate then people who find you on Facebook. (more…)
June 22, 2011
Another way of improving your conversation rate with your squeeze pages is by briefly stating your privacy policy. For instance, “We keep all mailing list members’ contact info fully confidential. We will never sell, rent or in any way disclose this information to any third party unless required to do so by law.”
Also be sure to have multiple Like buttons on the landing pages for your Facebook ads. Having people clicking your Like buttons, along with a high Click Through Rate (CTR), are critical factors in getting lots of impressions for your ads while minimizing your costs per click. (more…)
June 20, 2011
Always Use Squeeze Landing Pages
You don’t want people clicking your ad, visiting your site, and then leaving. That’s just a waste of money and many people will do this if you don’t capture their contact info on your landing page. What you need to do is capture that person’s interest by having your ad link to a squeeze landing page. A landing page is the page people get directed to when they click your ad. A squeeze landing page has a single thing to offer (eg. foreclosure properties) and the visitor is either interested or they aren’t. If your Facebook ad clearly states “Toronto Foreclosure Homes” and someone clicks it then you can bet if your squeeze page describes the exact same thing and only that you’ll have a lot of people following through and providing their email address for receiving updates via email on this type of property. Remember, the entire point of your real estate website is building your email database of qualified prospects, and squeeze pages are a very important way of doing that. (more…)
June 17, 2011
Using this approach I’ve found my average cost per click rate gets cut in half vs. bidding at or near the suggested minimum bid price. The only problem with using the lowball bid per click method is you won’t get nearly as many ad impressions than if your ads are at or near the suggested minimum bid per click. This is why you want to create loads of lowball ads with slight tweaks to the ad headline, body and the image you use.
In general, if you have ads bid at less than 25% of the suggested minimum bid (eg. 20 cents for a minimum $1 bid) then you’ll find your ads get very few impressions. Still, it’s worth setting up ads at these lowball prices as you’ll get a few very inexpensive clicks from time to time which will lower your overall Average Cost Per Click significantly. (more…)
June 15, 2011
Have Highly Nuanced Ad Pricing
Whenever you look at a large group of prospects there are usually a multitude of ways of dividing that group of prospects up into smaller and smaller groups. For example, you can immediately divide any group roughly in half by separating male from female. Age is another great way of dividing your groups up, as is relationship status. The fewer number of prospects Facebook identifies as suitable for each ad based on your specifications, the better. This is known as taking the Long Tail approach to marketing. Long Tail Marketing is the cornerstone of any highly successful Pay Per Click system. (more…)
June 13, 2011
These are the numbers we get for the following age ranges while keeping all the other variables we’re using the same:
Ages 18-25 – 9520 Total Prospects
Ages 26-35 – 14020 Total Prospects
Ages 36-45 – 8380 Total Prospects
Ages 46-55 – 4120 Total Prospects
Ages 56-64 – 1980 Total Prospects
Without Real Estate as in interest we get the following numbers:
Ages 18-25 – 1300 Total Prospects
Ages 26-35 – 2380 Total Prospects
Ages 36-45 – 1980 Total Prospects
Ages 46-55 – 1300 Total Prospects
Ages 56-64 – 780 Total Prospects
So when whittling down your prospect pool, the key thing to remember is this: the smaller the number of qualified prospects per ad, the better. The better qualified prospects you have, the better click through rate you’ll have, and consequently the less you’ll have to pay per click. (more…)
June 10, 2011
Now if your office is right in New York City you may want to see how many people are within X miles of the city. By changing this one variable we get the following results:
New York City + people within 25 miles – Total Prospects = 28,960
New York City + people within 10 miles – Total Prospects = 19,920
New York City alone – Total Prospects = 19,920
So by changing this one variable you’ve reduced the total number of prospects by 44%. (more…)
June 8, 2011
Previous page
