Are boosted posts being overlooked?

Logan Hickman
Nov 7 · 3 min read

Attention is the currency that all companies and entrepreneurs are looking for in todays time. Where is the most attention, and how can we get it for the lowest cost?

I’ve found that wherever the majority of companies are injecting their product or service, the more expensive that medium will be to achieve viable attention. Something I’ve noticed is that everyone thinks boosting a post is stupid when you can use the facebook ads manager for much more robust targeting. This seems like it would make sense depending on the application, however something to think about is the fact that not many brands are boosting… Wouldn’t this mean that impressions, engagement, leads, and purchases would be cheaper because the bids aren’t as high? Or are you still bidding against everyone using the ads manager too? I thought that there’s no way to know for certain unless I run a test.

At Project1 Agency, my team and I decided to run a test for a client of ours in the real estate vertical, with the goal of building an email list within 48 hours. The desired outcome was to build a list of people that are looking to buy a new home locally, but also have a house to sell. We decided to test the difference between a basic lead ad and a regular boosted post, so that we can compare the performance to cost ratio between the two.

After we outlined the targeting strategy, copywriting, and creatives we built out a very basic campaign with the “lead generation” objective to acquire email only. We then took all of those same assets and applied it to a basic post with the only difference being the way people take their call to action. Rather than requiring that they visit our clients website, we decided to ask that they drop their email below in the comment section of the post. We did this because we wanted to make it more competitive to the lead ad, while keeping the end goal the same.

Of course we kept the daily budget congruent to each of the ads, and we were also lucky enough to get both of the ads approved within 5–10 minutes of one another. So with that being said we took a few steps back for a few days, totaling 48 hours from the time of approval.

Here’s what we found; Each of the ads did really well for our client, however the boosted post did actually outperform the lead ad by a long shot. With the same budget/spend the boosted post got more impressions, engagement, and a bigger email list. I believe that this is due to the fact that the CTA was seemingly less invasive to the end consumer for the boosted post and it stayed inline with what they’re already doing on the platform, rather than having to fill out a box. To remove any lurking variables that may have occurred from organic reach, we did hide the boosted post from the timeline.

Obviously so many more questions can stem off of these findings, but the main idea is that they both work really well and you should always be testing new angles when it comes to your companies client/customer acquisition.

Logan Hickman

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Founder of Project1 Agency | Marketing Consultant for mid-market real estate firms | Problem Solver