Spent $2,000 on Facebook Ads

Yeah $1.5k on FB and $1k on Google and I'm guessing with no real serious investment into training ($600+ say into 121 training or courses at least).

That's like saying I posted 20 mailers in the post / went to one networking event / sent 20 cold emails.

That's such a tiny amount to try to learn what will and won't work for your brand, even if working with a professional in ads.
You need to learn what's the right audience / copy / creative / platform / placement / time of day etc.

Say $1,500 gives you 750 clicks. 750 / 4 audiences = 187 clicks per audience. You likely barely would get 1-5 conversions per audience which are far too little numbers to answer which is best. Same goes for all other factors above.

And they all need to stack up their learning to really build up to success. Once you learn which audience is best that goes from 0 to 5 conversions p/m. Same process with images gets you 5 to 10. same for copy 10 to 20 etc.

You can get lucky but it generally takes a company months to figure this stuff out and requires someone with actual training in the platform.

Haha that's a good point

Sure, if it is clearly a gamble, it's a gamble. But from what I can tell the consistent return on investment is attainable in creating better offers, better copy, better ads, better targeting. I think the analogy is, if we're going with "gambling analogies" that it's closer to poker, than slot machines.

At least the thinking that I'm going with at the moment is that I can improve in all of those areas.

If I continue to spend and only get paid net 60, then I'll have to curb my spending. But if I can get at least the ad spend back within 7 to 30 days then I'm on a profitable consistent path.

Here's another way of seeing it: I was running a newsletter a few years ago and I was making roughly $4 per subscriber per year. In my current set up I'm making about $21 per customer LTV selling a product/membership to a video library. And I think I'm still undermoentized since I can add in workshops, and consulting at a higher rate than I'm doing now. Spending most of my time on the video library, and customer service. But can switch to consulting and workshops to increase LTV later. And it would always be great to have more customers when I do run workshops.

Of course I have a wider amount of products, prices, and customers than I had when I ran a newsletter but it's a good baseline. It makes me realize that no matter what if I can convert FB Ad spend to at least newsletter subscribers I have a monetization channel and I know my COGS vs ARPU.

With 2.9 Billion users, it's majority of internet users. For me it works out well because there are 1.5 Billion Google Sheets users. It's quite a large "niche", right?

Even if there's maximum 30,000 to 50,000 people you can target, I think FB ads is useful to get them to come back to your site. Retargeting is a no-brainer for reaching people who already know your site.

Not just retargeting and moving to a paid user, but also to bring back old users, to upgrade.

I'm using targeting now for upgrades from website visitors to free members, AND from free members to paid members.

This is an interesting path. I like the hustle. Charge low, get in on the ground floor, get paid to learn and learn by spending other businesses' money.

I have been using growthmentor.com and reached out to some mentors on there with PPC experience. Had calls with them. One person who gave me a great campaign structure idea I've followed up with almost every two weeks to share what's working and what's not. Each time he has some insight for me that I would not have picked out.

And each week he can see the results. So he's learning as well what's working and what's not, by my ad spend. While he does this day to day for his work, I'm at least a few more bits of data.

The experience is helpful: having to report to someone what's working, and what's changing as I do send him a loom video when i get a new idea, and set up a new thing, and if I see surprising results.

I'm sure there are FB ad masterminds I can join, but I do like specifically interfacing with someone who is an expert, not just someone else flailing around on fb ads.

And I've been watching a LOT more youtube videos of fb ads, This guy Ben Heath seems good and I like this structure as well as how he presents some ideas.

:)

Looking at the experts, they all have this minimum spend, and I think that quickly correlates, in people's minds, as a minimum spend to be successful. And I myself thought for a while that I had to spend $800 USD or more each month to be successful. But that's not true at all. Simple retargeting campaigns can be extremely profitable at less than USD $10 a day and leave it at that. No need to spend money on new cold customers if you have other channels and a limited budget, right?

I agree 100% that it's scalable. but this too seems like a myth. The more I read, watch about FB ads and learn by doing, that there is a point at which ads go "stale". Seems like each and every audience, plus ad has an S curve. The cost per conversion ends up going up for each individual pairing. So from this I infer that I need to be vigilant and continually improve the copy, improve/change/test the targeting, as well as improve/change/test the "offer".

What I like about this is that FB ads seem like one thing to those who don't know much. I hear the phrase "FB Ads" thrown around as a negative in most indiehacker circles. But in actuality it's quite a lot of parts, quite a lot of moving pieces.

And I'm so glad I'm in the middle of it right now with not a great offer and not a great priced product. As I increase the price over the next 12 - 18 months and change the offer, I think it will only improve. And the base line has been set. I know I can get new audiences on my freebies (in droves now) and I can get existing visitors back to the site with consistency.

Regarding your mention about reps: I have heard this too from others, so it's no surprise. FB Ad reps are literally trying to get you a "win" as quickly as possible with no connection what so ever to your revenue, or your own goals. For example they will tell you to do awareness, and traffic and conversions campaigns. Meaning they can show "results" as impressions, and link clicks very fast, so you think well I can convert these later! Where the people I've talked to that run FB ads (not FB ad reps) will say you need to set your goal as to what you really want, conversions. sales. money in the bank. Then work backwards from there. There are other goals you can set to test, but first test the sales!

Also, I set up times to speak to FB Ad Reps twice and both times an hour before the call they cancelled. SO WEIRD. it happened twice already so I'm just not even trying to get on a third call. As an Indiehacker dad, I set my calendar for the day and it's done. I do it or do not. I had an hour to go play with my son, but couldn't plan anything else beyond that , last minute, because I thought I was going to be on a call.

I can't understand the indie hackers argument advocating the non-use of paid ads.

Of course, try not to depend on them, work on your digital positioning and SEO, but USE paid ads, and use it strategically.

In my particular case, I'm glad I don't have to solely rely on comparisons to other indie makers. Since my core offering is a tutorial library which happens to come with templates and tools and scripts, I can compare nicely with course creators. And other experts who offer workshops as well. These high ticket items are doing great on FB. I looked at a digital agency like Agexa and see they spent $35M on FB ads to generate $70M of revenue. Great they essentially got a 2x ROAS, but look at that revenue number after the ad spend: $35M.. wow.

I recall someone speaking at a little event once who spent $90,000 in Facebook ads to make $100,000 and I thought . eeke, that's a lot to spend. But then I realized. well at that point I'd love to have made $10,000. And getting customers always leads to more revenue. Because some course creators can sell again and again.

A person converting at $100 in ad spend to get revenue of $100 sounds terrible. But that same person can buy another course at $100.

And there are audiences out there that just won't see your tweet, EVER. FB and Goog have audiences that are just not going to see your IH post, or your reddit post. they just won't. But they will see your FB ad. or Google Ad.

That book looks good. I like the subtitle from an early version: How to Access 600 Million Customers in 10 Minutes. that number is like 2.9B now :)

I did set up a video campaign to get people to watch many videos and then retarget them when they do watch 75%. then I use a Lookalike audience to add more cold audience to the mix that are higher possibility to convert to the 75% watched :)

I'm definitely trying to work my way up to $2k a month. More than half way there in August. but will try to pare it down below $1k for September until I can get some cash faster. I think after 3-6 months of consistent ads I can keep going up in budget as the cash from AppSumo comes on net 60 terms. so in 2 months I get this month's payments.

My organic numbers are weird. Because I do PR, Blog, SEO, Marketplace (appsumo).. so generally speaking I have a $0 cost for marketing. Obviously I should figure out my time spent on each of these things and factor that, but as a solo person I just do more of what is working, and what I think genuinely will help more people. Most of the PR I do is podcasts and interviews about my journey so it's not directly affiliated with marketing to the product.

To balance the cost of FB ads, I am also considering adding more costs like to specific writers for certain blog posts or parts of my site I want to use for SEO. For example also considering applying more dev costs to create SEO-only pages. So there will be a cost there.

I have written down 17 things I can do consistently and that are all FREE cost. The only real cost is my time. I can scale each and every one of those up with additional spending sure, but with each one I would also spend more time. For example I "scaled" up twitter by writing for 1 month solely on twitter. It worked but I couldn't do it sustainably.

And I'm basically doing a month hard on each marketing channel

1 month on Twitter
1 month on YouTube
1 month on Facebook ads

And each one isn't 100% based on ROI. I also base my decision to keep going on factors including "Do I like it?" "Can I test more?" "Can I continue doing this myself?"

The most important part of the decision ( this year) is that the marketing channel can exist asynchronously in my life. Oddly scheduling a lot of tweets, is async, but the generally scaling on twitter is not async. While I can set up a new FB campaign for 1 week and literally leave for a week, come back and see how it did. I can pick it up and check it any time of day and there's no downgrade of experience.

To get back to FB Ads and your question about ROAS, I posted my overall ROAS, but I dial in and can see which campaigns and which ad sets and which ads actually drove the revenue. I started off with a bit too many ideas. And that's where I can identify overspend. In campaigns that I thought would work, spent $80 - $120 on them with 0 results or rather they got 1 result and then two weeks later, nothing.

There's a weird thing that can happen: it's been stated to me that I can "break" the profitability of a campaign by changing the budget too much too quickly. And another weird thing is that I can end up with campaigns that never leave the "learning" phase because I'm testing too low of a budget.

It's a matter of dialing these in correctly to make the most of my ad spend month to month later.

for example I tested out lead magnets early on and got 0 results at $1 per day. Turned it off. Then recently (in the past 2 weeks) I just created a new campaign, new ad set, new ads, and spent the right money. ($10 per day across 10 ads) Because I know I can spend $10 in one day to test it out or $70 in a week to test and can cut it off if nothing. But if I spend $1 per day and get nothing... I'd have to wait 70 days to see the same results. Also it might not ever convert because each ad is an auction.

I would hope people are reading my product update and don't think of it as a single post. I wrote this as an update to my product that's been around for 2 years already. I don't want to misrepresent this fb ad spend.

I've already gotten a great sales channel with AppSumo Marketplace. That's not going away any time soon. But I do wish to get out of that particularly small market (2-3 million users) and into a larger market of 20-30 million google sheet users who pay for courses/tools/tutorials.

Also consider just going hard on one specific audience that is more likely to buy than anyone else on the planet. IF that group is 30,000 to 50,000 large, then you can also target them on FB. But I would consider doing a 360 type campaign. Targeting them on each and every platform. FB, IG, Goog, Newsletters, TikTok, Twitter. It can't be much money per month to target the same people over and over again wherever they go, for 5-10 days.

I'm working on a campaign format right now that is 10 different pieces of ad creative, but targeting one single audience and capping the frequency, so they only see 2 ads per day. This is diametrically opposed to the normal campaign theory of a few ads that work well to as many people as possible. If you want more on this, I found it on YouTube on a channel by Ben Heath. It's called "Omnipresent"

I'd say, first put a link in your IH profile. I tried taking a look at your site and have no way to get to it. I don't even know the name of it. IF it's there, in your profile, then I missed it.

What kind of traffic do you want? to what end? IF possible the best is to make money directly, but there are so many other ways to collect users, like with lead magnets, and with newsletter signups. And that converts faster/easier so you can actually get some data into FB if you've never done ads before. advertising a direct offer can sometimes just result in 0 sales. But it's always worth a shot, then add in other conversions.

I would not recommend spending so much on paid ads with a new product. Seed the userbase, visitors, with existing marketplaces, and directories (PH, IH, AppSumo) then once you get even 100 visitors a month I think retargeting is the way to go first for FB ads. I was scared for so long to do any paid ads and didn't have any budget for it. So I'm far behind. Hence why I'm spending so much now.

ranges from under a dollar to over $100. I have different levels of customers. freebies, lead magnets, trip wires, free sign ups, monthly members, lifetime members.

But also technically most of my customers are absolutely free via AppSumo marketplace except i pay 30% after the sale. And I've raised prices recently so that's actually a substantial number now. Which incentivizes Appsumo to promote me more, because it earns them more. Thus my personal CAC goes down even if /when I spend money.

Thanks. anything in particular you liked? Something else I can answer, to go deeper for you?

I sell Google Sheets tutorials, templates, and tools at BetterSheets.co

While there is no interest targeting for "Google Sheets" there is "List of Google Products" and other "Google" related interests like google workspace. I would start there.

But I would also make at least 2 different interest based ad sets, 1 that is broad and 1 that is extremly defined. I just did this recently and had success on day for a freebie. I used "Define further" as much as I could to get down under 100,000 extremely defined audience. And I added other broad ad sets too. The trick I discovered is to use CBO to let FB test these audiences itself.

And then I created another campaign for retargeting. I do think this is an easy mistake to make because I didnt do CBO yet. I think I actually should be making another ad set with the retargeting a warm audience, not a seperate campaign.

Here is something that might not be intuituve for targeting: I sell a Google Sheets course and one of my best ad sets is targeting Udemy users. Everyone and their mother would have suggested "Google Sheets" as an interest.

Look for similar price point products that your customers also buy. I even experimented with Excel users. While this wont work for an addon, it shows I think just how much breadth you can test.

I tried education, learning, spreadsheet, and way more. Try many, try many deep cuts, then make Lookalike audiences when you get any traffic.

Try worldwide, cut out obvious black holes of FB low quality clicka. I had to exclude Bangladesh and Nepal. FB spent a large percentage of early cash there. And I know those two countries are far down my list of customer locations. Data I get from Google Analytics, and Gumroad.

Hope that helps.

A simple answer for you is you can stack interests. So for example interests in recruitment maybe is one and interests in google sheets. That'd be the dream haha. You can go into the interests and look around for what are the best options for you. Come up with 2 or 3 and then test them against each other and make sure to give it decent budget and enough time.

Autobid.

I'm testing all types of events to optimize for: mainly sales but recently have added in lead magnets, so the conversion event is the download of that lead magnet.

I've been turning on CBO recently to new campaigns because I overthink the ad sets and ads and try to test too many theories at once. So what's happened is that too little ad spend on each ad gets no results. I turned on CBO to one of these campaigns recently and it quickly identified what worked. 1 ad in 1 ad set, and then it seems like it's trying each one each day, with good results so far. So I like CBO so far.

But I'm not doing CBO or the ad set level one on all campaigns. There are definitely some ad sets I want to test vs each other on a day to day basis.

What I haven't tested yet with CBO, and I'd like to is to mix Cold and Warm audiences. Instead I have just different campaigns for these and what I saw recently struck me as not intuitive but totally logical.

what's your take on this?
Set up 4 cold audience ad sets, and 1 warm audience ad set, set up CBO so that FB itself allocates the appropriate spend across those 5 ad sets. While there will be far more people in the 4 cold audience ad sets, the price per conversion across the whole campaign will be lower because you include the warm audience in there.

why?