This is a post I submitted to Manta a few weeks back detailing my experience with a Facebook ad campaign. I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback from others and hope you find value in it as well.
Hello all,
I started a business, StickyPaper, in October 2015 as a reseller/distributor of labels and other printer consumables that you would find in a shipping department or warehouse environment. As a solopreneur, I made the transition from 100% in-office work to working for myself and I am loving the flexibility of working from home.
I am focused on serving the small to mid-sized manufacturers in my geographic region, to start. My primary means of getting customers is driving traffic to my website and having them reach out to me via e-mail so I can make a formal quote or proposal.
I have a Facebook page, Twitter account, have registered my business on Google+, Bing and even created a YouTube channel with my company overview video. I’ve also got an ebay store and I have posted in select Craigslist cities to get as much information on my company as possible.
This is a side project for me and I have been plugging along with roughly two to three unique visitors to my site per day in the last 30-45 days. A week ago, I decided to revinvest some of my profits into a Facebook campaign. Since I have a very limited budget, I chose for the shortest campaign Facebook would allow: $5 a day for 7 days. For $35, the potential benefit was going to more than outweigh the cost.
I selected a very targeted area. US only and in States adjacent to where my suppliers are located. Shipping tends to be a a sensitive cost driver for this customer base, so I didn’t want to make my pitch to some place that my current suppliers can’t service quickly or inexpensively. I also segmented my category for people that cared about small businesses, manufacturing, etc. I realize I am segmenting myself into a very miniscule pool, but if you’re a small business owner, like me, you want to make sure your $5 a day is going to be seen by someone who gives a **bleep**, and not some teenager that wants to see what Justin Bieber is Instagramming for lunch today.
So that’s the backstory, and before I get into the numbers, we all have to have goals, and these were my expectations with my $35 campaign:
– Double my unique visitors to 6 per day for each day of the campaign
– Get two REAL e-mail inquiries from prospects that lead to a project or proposal
– 3 “Likes” for my Facebook page
So here’s how it played out:
| Views | Unique Visitors | Average Views Per User | Day |
| 7 | 3 | 2.33 | Tuesday |
| 10 | 3 | 3.33 | Wednesday |
| 5 | 5 | 1.00 | Thursday |
| 17 | 7 | 2.43 | Friday |
| 6 | 6 | 1.00 | Saturday |
| 10 | 7 | 1.43 | Sunday |
| 15 | 9 | 1.67 | Monday |
| 70 | 40 | 1.75 | 7-Day Total |
| 10 | 6 | 1.75 | Average 7-Day |
– Double my unique visitors to 6 per day for each day of the campaign
So I did average 6 unique visitors during the 7-day campaign, but I think it remains to be seen how “quality” that traffic really was. When I was average 2-3 unique visitors per day, I felt like they were more engaged in what I was offering, and therefore, more likely to send an e-mail and one step closer to the sale.
I also noticed that during this campaign, a lot (~20-33%) of my traffic came from countries outside the US. So even though I limited it to the US only, I still got hits from foreign locales in India, Italy, Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines. Again, those are not regions I’m serving, so while I “doubled” my unique visitors, I would argue that they are not visitors that I could benefit from.
What I liked about Facebook is that it broke it down into the number of people that saw my ad and clicked on it by Age, Gender and the ad Placement (showed up in the main News Feed, right side bar ad or Mobile News Feed). 28 of the 34 website clicks attributed to Facebook came from Mobile News Feed ad placement. This explains a lot. If you look at the activity in Thursday and Saturday, my site had 5 unique visitors with 5 page views and 6 visitors with 6 views on Saturday. Kind of a crappy story in engaging the customer when they got to my page, huh? But, if they were scrolling on their phones and accidentally tapped instead of scrolling on my ad, they got to my page, realized it’s nothing of interest to them, and the clicked off and went back to Facebook.
– Get two REAL e-mail inquiries from prospects that lead to a project or proposal
So while page views and visitors are nice, this is the real metric that gets me closer to driving sales and making some money. During this campaign, I had one e-mail inquiry from someone that found me on Craigslist. He’s kind of a competitor doing the same thing I do and was looking to check pricing. So yes, it’s an opportunity to make a proposal, but wasn’t something that was a real opportunity to convert to sales.
Needless to say, I’m disappointed that I didn’t get any actionable leads from my $35.
– 3 “Likes” for my Facebook page
So I got 2 page “Likes” for my StickyPaper Facebook page. I also got a “Like” from someone who saw my Facebook ad and liked the ad. Again, “Likes” don’t keep the lights on in the building, but you assume enough of the Likes will get your page some credibility and help you build up your pipeline of prospects. It’s odd because after reading the profiles of the three individuals, I have no idea why they would have liked my page and I would highly doubt that they are prospects that I could ever convert into customers in the future.
So that’s my long drawn out summary of my experience with advertising on Facebook. It didn’t cost much money, and at the same time it didn’t necessarily get me anything (so far). I’m not giving up on the platform completely. I plan to tier my online advertising campaign. So I’m going to take February off from Facebook, but will probably cash in my free Bing ad credits to see if that forum yields better results.
Online advertising is going to be just one component of my promotion strategy. I’m still going to blog regularly, post on Twitter regularly which feeds my Facebook page feed, and network, network, network.
I hope you found value from this post, and if you’re glad that I just saved you $35 
, I would certainly appreciate it if you “Liked” my page on Facebook! Thanks for your time!
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StickyPaper LLC 
Thanks for sharing your findings!
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