I've recently gone really deep into Facebook advertising (self taught) while I manage the ad campaigns for a few pages. I can't get over how interesting the analytics side is once you start to dig really deep. I thought this could be a cool place to share some discoveries, the kinds of things I'm not seeing in a many articles about it (and certainly podcasts never get this deep).

Maybe I'll share some of what I've seen and ask a few questions to kick off.

For starters, I'm shocked at how much better my click-through is after 8pm (this is probably noob stuff for most of you). It's such an order of magnitude better that I don't see why I'll bother advertising much during the day.

Likewise my nut-low click-through is always during rush hour (so I won't be paying to run ads then anymore).

Next, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the event response-type ads have the added benefit of obtaining page-likes (makes sense), but for less money than when I try to run an actual like buying campaign. The other interesting thing is that 1 in 10 who mark an interest to the event go like the page. I figure retargeting those other 9 for my next like campaign will probably show really high conversions. My ads all click through over 4% but my targeting is super selective. That brings me to questions:

1) I let facebook autobid. Anyone do it another way?

2) What's the latest on placement? I only do newsfeed sort of intuitively. Anyone doing it elsewhere on FB?

3) Is there a way to do multiple exclusions that I'm missing? Like exclude people who like my page AND people who are attending my event. I didn't see that functionality anywhere

Anyway that's a start, I look forward to posting more things like this as I figure them out. I just discovered the "higher than average spend" category in the targeting, I'm quite curious to see if that works on some luxury items I want to market.

What products or services are you advertising?

-health and nutrition page that's pretty niche
-luxury furniture that's also fairly niche
-woodworking classes
-events for collectors of pretty niche collectables

Links?

I don't have any sort of overwhelming interest to the share the pages tbh, there may be 1-2 of them I'd like to share eventually.

I recently came across these guys: https://www.moo.com/us/

And I'm obsessed with their marketing. I know the probably have a decent amount of money backing their content creation and ads, but I think they're where I want to be in a year for my own stuff (not the size of the company, but the quality of the content and marketing).

Over the weekend I managed to get an ad targeting parent groups to click through at 6% for the whole weekend. It's not that hard to do when you're giving away free stuff, but I still found I had to avoid certain times of day to maintain that number. Specially meal times was a big no-no for targeting moms on FB. Night time continued to be the best time for all my ads, can get up to 9% Click through and .08 CPC. Anyway I know that it doesn't matter if the sales conversions don't accompany it, but for this ad set I'll only know based on event attendance how the ad sets worked. 5 more days till that.

Are you building these FB pages as a means to eventually market and link to your custom wood product website to increase sales? I'm assuming this is the case based on the content of the pages you described

Or are you more building them to learn about FB advertising/marketing.

OFA seems like he would be a good person to get input from -- posting a couple of your pages might be beneficial to you tbh.

What do your ads look like in terms of content and imagery?

I decided to try and get as much real world experience as humanly possible since my intention is to work for myself either through my art/furniture brand, or something else. So right now I do a combo of helping out family, some volunteer stuff, and some paid gigs while I finish my self learning on branding (which was the big missing piece to help create my own company).

The biggest FB page I get to run ads for is coming up on 6000 likes (gained almost 1000 of those last month), so it does give me something reasonable to work off (even if that's still somewhat small). I'm absolutely going to share with OFA when it comes time to get feedback on my own company. I'm hoping for you guys to give me all kinds of honest feedback on that (and believe me it will be appreciated).

The ad for the event this weekend that's getting the really high click-through with mom's aged 36-45, who are interested in parents/parenting/motherhood, excludes late technology adopters, and is restricted to 20 mi from the event is this:

imgur being frustrating, not sure why my images won't go up. Will try to upload them later.

What kind of engagement are you getting on the content you are posting to the page with 6K followers?

So that's the rub, I don't do much of the content management for that page, just ads and analytics. I want to keep it that way too because I'd only want to spend the level of effort on content management when it's fully my baby. But right now the page does 7% engagement on an average post and tends to top out around 16% on a really good post. We used to have periods of 3-4 weeks where it was just 3% engagement (I've only seen one post below 3%), but that's been cleaned up a lot recently.

Is this real? http://www.michaelleander.me/blog/fa...ate-benchmark/

Our engagement rate is super high because we're constantly giving prizes away to the page and it's super niche. I had no idea above 1% was good.

Without a doubt the "tag your friends who are attending" and such produces the best results. We haven't had too much original content go viral yet.

Hoping one of you guys can answer this for me:

I get ads that click through incredibly for say 10,000 impressions. I assume 10k is a half decent sample size but I don't know how reliable it is. Sometimes I'll pause that ad while I'm regrouping over budget/strategy, and when I unpause it my ct falls off a cliff. It got me thinking about a concept I hadn't totally considered when it comes to the total audience FB is telling me I'm marketing to. Say it tells me there are 50k women in my niche, and I hit the first 10k of those very well. If I see my click through start to fail miserably after 10k, could I consider that it's very possible it's the same 10k women who are online quite often, and the other theoretical 40k FB told me about just have accounts, but they may really only come online once a week or something? And if that's the case, does anyone know if there's a setting to target frequent users over infrequent users?

Btw touching wood right now, but I set a ticket sales record with my ads. Right now I've got an ad clicking through just under 10%, I'll post the final stats when I stop it.

Most of what you post makes little sense without context. It makes sense to you because you know the pages, you post on the pages etc. Not sure how any real discussion can happen without the pages being known.

I am not sure what the big secret is on this either.

Unsubscribing. Best of luck.