Widening Visibility on Social Media with Ads
Reaching more wine lovers 🍷 in London beyond our close friends by evaluating Facebook Ads 📈 for UnscrewMe.
Just after we launched UnscrewMe, we took advantage of a free $15 credit Facebook seems to be offering everyone who creates a new page. We used the credit for a little test to get an idea how Facebook advertisements perform.
Overall, we were satisfied with the results. Although the basic findings might be of limited use, given our minimal budget and not yet massive reach, we decided to share our observations anyway.
One effect was easily visible in our web app traffic analytics: when we “promoted” a post, as this type of Facebook ad is called, we really got more users from Facebook, so the ads definitely work.
Initial insights
Now, the question is how well Facebook Ads work and if it is worth the investment. Since it was “free” for us to do this initial test run, we do not need to be too critical of the advertisement cost.
We split our budget up in two — or rather used the remaining budget for a second “boost”, after the first one expired. We did notice some significant differences between the two ads. But let’s start at the beginning.
The two posts we “boosted” were similar, but there was one key difference: the first ad just used a link preview, while the second ad included a photo.
Considering the constant reports about shortening attention spans, it probably makes sense that images are more likely to trigger any action. Overall, both posts were similar in length, yet the photo still made a difference in how people reacted to the boosted post.
While the boosted post with a photo attracted 4 link clicks per day, the one with just the link preview only had 1 link click per day on average.
The cost per click was also lower for the boosted post with the photo. The difference was smaller than for the average clicks per day with $0.23 for the post with a photo compared to $0.32 for the post without a photo. But this is still a substantial difference, rendering the boosted post with a photo much more effective on this metric.
However, the boosted post without a photo did better on one metric. Looking not at the actions, but at the people reached, the post without an image came in at just $0.020 compared to $0.037 per reached person for the post with a photo.
Putting performance in perspective
With the figures for the different metrics being not entirely conclusive, we need to look at which metrics matter most to us, to understand which of the two posts really did better in the end.
When you “boost” a post on Facebook, you need to specify what your target metric is. For both posts, we selected link clicks, so clearly the metric on clicks is the more important one. With this additional information, we can say that the second post with an image clearly performed better for UnscrewMe.
One curious observation, and I don’t know if that is in any way connected to the Facebook ads: for both campaigns, the visits on UnscrewMe dipped substantially about a week after the “boost” ended. To me, it’s surprising that it’s not an immediate effect after the campaign, but it seemingly lags behind a week.
Reviewing results
Given the small budget and the fairly low number of visits in total, it might be a bit of a stretch to draw any definite conclusions. That said, looking at our first experiences with Facebook Ads, we would recommend to always include a photo or other picture in any posting. People seem to like pictures, so to engage people, we should give the pictures.
Furthermore, Facebook itself appears to be biased in that regard, preferring posts with images, most likely based on their experience across all ads they serve. As a result, boosting a post with a picture maximises the likelihood of Facebook placing the ad in people’s newsfeeds. That alone could have a big impact on a campaign and improve the performance of an ad.
In summary, we are happy that we got this free $15 credit from Facebook to test out their ad offering. For us, placing a Facebook Ad definitely had a positive impact on visitor numbers. And by aligning closely with Facebook’s ad recommendations, we managed to improve the performance of our ad.
In addition, advertising on Facebook also led to a couple of post and page likes, which increases the overall reach of UnscrewMe even after the campaign has finished. This effect in particular makes advertisements on Facebook appear somewhat sustainable, beyond the immediate “click” and “reach” figures reported for a. individual campaign.
Despite the good results, we cannot yet say if the investment in Facebook Ads is worth the return. We’ll continue to experiment and see how we can improve our use of social media with and without ads.
In our next article, we will present some new wine bars across London that opened or changed recently. Looking a bit further, we will also look at the performance of a Google Ad campaign we launched after the Facebook Ad trial. We will try to compare the performance of both and see if we can see which option is more effective to grow usage of UnscrewMe.
(Besides discovering the stunning Danish coffee shop Hjem Kensington, we’ve also enjoyed some more interesting wines at the “Modern Wines of Bulgaria” trade tasting when finalising this article. It was refreshing to look beyond universally recognised grape varieties and sampling a red wine like the 2016 Mavrud from Maryan Winery located in the Thracian Valley region or the 2015 Bouquet from Borovitza located in the Danubian Plains, region and made from old vines. The 2014 Ogy’s Legacy white wine also from Borovitza Winery from vineyards in Northwest Bulgaria was a particularly pleasant blend of Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Viognier as well as the local grape variety Rikat or Rkatsitelli.)
