Facebook Cookbook - Jay Goldman [163]
Figure 10-1. Getting started with Facebook ads
Next, you are asked to choose your target demographic. You don’t want to take a scattershot approach here. Understand who might use your application and target them specifically. In this case, we assume that we want to target people in the U.S. who are over 18 and have expressed interest in interior design, interior decorating, or architecture, as shown in Figure 10-2. We’ll later craft our messaging explicitly for them.
Figure 10-2. Choose Audience page
Now we’re ready to create the ad. Choose a tagline, some descriptive text, and an image (Figure 10-3).
Figure 10-3. Create Ad page
We’re now ready for the final step: setting your budget. In this dialog (Figure 10-4), you will be asked whether you want to pay per click or pay per view. Try each and see which performs best. You’ll also be prompted to set a bid price. Facebook suggests values that correspond to current bids for similar demographics. It’s a good starting point, but you should try different values and see which gets you the best results per unit cost. Facebook also builds in a safety net so that you don’t blow your budget with an unexpected success.
Figure 10-4. Set Budget page
Another approach to consider is buying ads on the large app aggregators, such as Slide or Rock You. Buying ads on their apps (which include Super Wall and FunWall) can gain you large numbers of viewers at a reasonable cost.
There is no single solution that works in all cases. Your best approach is to try several and see which campaigns work best for your app. The key to success is to measure the success of each campaign, and to keep doing this over time. Your success rate will change as users become familiar with your ad, and so refreshing the ad and measuring its success will help you acquire a maximum number of users.
To get a sense of how well this can work, let’s take SceneCaster as an example. We launched the application in late September 2007 and did not promote it at first. We wanted to get the kinks out before launching our marketing effort to promote it. In early December we had reached a total of 3,000 users and decided to launch our marketing campaign, using a combination of Facebook ads and ads with Rock You. Within two weeks we skyrocketed to become the most active application on Facebook. By Christmas we had reached a total of 100,000 users. Roughly six months later we reached 1,000,000. We’ve now ramped down our spending in terms of dollars spent per total number of users we have, and let the viral nature of the app kick in to help attract new users.
For me, the key to a successful launch is to pay attention to your promotion. Set yourself a budget for how much you want to spend to kick-start your app. This will help you decide how long you want to maintain your ad campaigns and give you a clear understanding of how much you are willing to spend. The next step concerns how you maintain and maximize your viral aspect. Facebook gives you several tools to achieve this, specifically Notifications, requests, and friend invitations. Your key challenge will be to find a good trade-off between communicating enough and being perceived as spam. There is no magic formula here. Once again, the best way to find this out is to measure your success. Whenever you modify the number of Notifications and request opportunities, you should check to see the percentage of new users compared to the total number of users. One thing to look at specifically is the number of remove requests. This is often linked to over-communication and means that your communications are being perceived as spam. At one point we dramatically increased the amount of messaging we were generating and immediately saw a decrease in our rate of net new users. We quickly pulled back and tried alternate approaches.