Case by Digmus: does Facebook advertising work well for an ICO?
Our Facebook advertising campaign started off with an unpleasant surprise. The first day it was launched, Facebook blocked our ad account as the content didn’t comply with their internal policies.
This is the message we saw several times:
Your advertisement hasn’t been approved because it contradicts our Advertising Policies. We reserve the right to decline any advertisement that contradicts these objectives.
We had several accounts and all of them were blocked. We tried creating them in different countries, through a VPN, paraphrased the announcements… Nothing worked. The only thing we managed to do was to find subcontractors (not in Russia) who had already been doing it and they placed the announcement via the existing ad account.
Surprisingly, the campaign launched from another account went smoothly and wasn’t blocked. However, there was a case when new forms were moderated for a while — around 24 hours. We spent more than USD 3 480 on Facebook advertising and the lead form drove 366 followers to us.
Facebook advertising campaign, first of all, suggested “lead ads”. Lead ad is a format of an ad: by clicking on it the user is referred to a contact form with pre-filled fields. Users needed to enter the email in order to be included on the mailing list. The Facebook lead with the lead form turned out to be cheaper than a clickable lead.
However, the Open Rate looked rather gloomy to say nothing of the CTR. Why? We have grounds to suspect that the relevance of the audience attracted on Facebook leaves much to be desired.
Finally, on October 12 when the pre-ICO was held we stopped the advertising campaign. As statistics has shown, it was the right decision as otherwise we would have had no advertising budget at all. No investors were found among emails received through the Facebook lead form.
Facebook is rather costly while its efficiency is extremely low. The Digmus team recommends being cautious when using Facebook advertising during an ICO. We are planning to use retargeting in the future as one of such cautious options, thus proving the relevance of our communication.
