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by JPTeasdale 3494 days ago
It's real. I asked all my digital marketing friends for advice too. I made ~20 iterations, tried different pictures, headlines, targeting schemes to no avail.

There are def ways to make it work, but it's not an easy thing. If I were to try again, I'd make an audio-less video.

4 comments

Getting started from 0 with ads on facebook is hard.

If you don't have good email lists, have the money to throw at ads to figure out your ad groups / demographics (just because purple fish people are your #1 customers doesn't mean they buy things off of facebook ads), and don't have a whole ecosystem (landing pages, cross platform re targeting, etc), its an uphill battle that even the pros can't always get working right.

Good on you for trying. Back when I ran ads, a common story from small clients was "I spent $50 - $200 and didn't get any sales, so I figured it wasn't for us" - At least you figured out it wasn't for you, or it wasn't for your budget/time scale.

Judging by the game, your target market is not the type of person who responds to a Facebook ad. I'm running tons of ads on FB, but my market is less sophisticated. I'm surprised by how many responses we get.
Just to throw in our experience (hardware product, UK market) we've tried facebook a few of times over the last 3 years.

The initial attempt was a massive fail, we wasted about £3K on facebook ads to generate about £300 in sales.

Following season we focussed on TV ads and generating lots of reviews from our existing happy customers. We then gave facebook another attempt at the end of the season and generated as much sales and traffic as all of the tv advertising for about £3k of facebook ads.

The primary difference was knowing who our customer is - which we learned from the TV ad customers, you can probably learn from your Kickstarter backers. For all of the TV generated sales we got reviews and sent out surveys to each customer. From this, we learned 1. What people loved about the product (which we could use is ad copy) and 2. Who they were and why they purchased.

This allowed us to create very targetted facebook ad campaigns and hence the improved ROI. Facebook is excellent at generating very cheap traffic but only when you get the audience dialed in.

Also, read anything written by Nick Kolenda (http://www.nickkolenda.com/) amazing stuff.

How about adding an ad on reddit?