Ya welcome!Geez man... thanks for the extensive effort. I really appreciate it.
Don't worry about the rankings. That's determined by how many people searches the keyword or content. Google determines it by how much it's linked, how much it's searched, and yadda yadda.So... all of this twitter/facebook/google plus gets you users or rankings or both?
Nope. Leave those open if you want the widest possible net.I think advertising on Facebook might be a good idea. Can you target specific groups?
I think advertising on Facebook might be a good idea. Can you target specific groups?
Unless you prefer throwing money against a wall and hoping some sticks, target your ad audience as close as you can. It's almost creepy how in depth you can target Facebook ads.Nope. Leave those open if you want the widest possible net.
It's not really throwing money at the wall. The thing you need to understand is that Facebook has around 800 million users worldwide. I will explain right now...Unless you prefer throwing money against a wall and hoping some sticks, target your ad audience as close as you can. It's almost creepy how in depth you can target Facebook ads.
Well, here's the thing. I'm going to use Call of Duty as an example here. Each game is an average 20 million units sold across COD4 to MW3.Just looked at the Facebook ad setup, "open" target in the US is ~169 million and if I broadly target it to my niche it's down to 2.5 million people. I don't know about you but I'd rather target it to a smaller group that's more likely to click the ad/like your page.
That's 78 million units sold worldwide. That's about as big as NES, or PlayStation. This means your mom, your dad, your grandfather, your gradmother, your uncle, your aunt, your nephew, your niece, your cousins, your brother, your sister already know about "Call of Duty." Not even World of Warcraft can touch these nimbers. Not even. Sorry. Not even.COD4: Modern Warfare – 17 million units.
COD: World at War – 11 million units.
COD: Modern Warfare 2 – 20 million units.
COD: Black Ops – 18 million units
I'd like to know, too. If you'd like to PM/PConvo it.BTW I'm curious, what is your niche (feel free to PM it)
Unless you prefer throwing money against a wall and hoping some sticks, target your ad audience as close as you can. It's almost creepy how in depth you can target Facebook ads.
Just looked at the Facebook ad setup, "open" target in the US is ~169 million and if I broadly target it to my niche it's down to 2.5 million people. I don't know about you but I'd rather target it to a smaller group that's more likely to click the ad/like your page.
Back in 2011 I decided to build the brand on Facebook. I ended up spending a measly $180, in Facebook ads, to get it started. If I remember right that took me to around 9-10k "likes". Then I noticed a trend in people from foreign countries (not my target audience) liking it. So I went and disabled all countries except the United Stated and Canada from seeing the page. After that the growth slowed down a little so I spent another $50 in ads to get it rolling again. The idea is to get it big enough that it reaches critical mass and starts growing via the recommendations etc. I can go days, if not a week, without posting anything and still have a number of people "like" the page. For example in the past 8 days I posted 9 things across 3 days and added 644 new likes.
Ok not sure where I was going with that lol, regardless......good luck on building your community!
BTW I'm curious, what is your niche (feel free to PM it)
Somehow, it seems like you ignored what I even was trying to say.This almost makes me want to take $100 and see what I can do with it in your niche. All I'd suggest is try narrowing it down and see what happens, you might be surprised.
You, again missed my point. The point that I was making, is that there are a lot of people who know about Call of Duty, and that I should not discount casuals. The greater market on facebook is too big for me to ignore. But I guess my tactic was a failure.Carlos don't take this personal but $70 to 100 likes is a very very crappy ROI. I'm mind boggled that you think that you shouldn't target your audience, even if you have one of the most well known games. Sure your grandma might know about this game (btw mine doesn't) but I would never target grandma's or anyone else over a certain age. Same goes for me, I'm a twenty something who knows what this game is but don't own or play it and don't have any intentions to. The idea is to weed out a lot of the people like me and get a more narrow target, even if it still is 20-50 million people.
Cheers for that - it's what I'm also seeing as well. Signups over twitter are a lot more successfulCrazyfruitbat - I use Facebook mainly to build the brand and promote other non forum things, not so much to try and get new signups. We have had a few come from there though, however like I've heard from other people it's hard to get new signups from Facebook, Twitter seems to be more effective.
Those of you with successful forums, how fast did you grow? How long til 1k posts and members? 10k of each?
Bravo! Great numbers! I am very impressed, and envious! I too am a niche site.In 2008 our forum started with 30 or so members from a similar forum, we're a niche site if anything so that helped as there are only a handful of sites like ours. I've been a member or modded these other sites since 2004 so I had a good idea what people wanted. We now have over 43,000 members, 70,000+ attachments in 270,000 posts. Within 2 years we had 10,000 posts/members. I didn't bother with SEO too much as word of mouth got around. We still don't rank that well for keywords I consider vital but even then we always have around 300-400 online at any given time, with 10,000 lurkers showing up once when we had a particularly interesting video posted. Nginx and our dedicated server handle all the traffic spikes well so I'm happy where I'm at right now. I expect us to overtake all other sites like ours by 2015 lol.
Ok so I decided to put my money where my mouth is. Spent $10 on ~166 million US users (Open) and another $10 on ~240,000 highly targeted US users (Targeted), both were shown the same ad.
Open (~166 million users):
61 clicks that turned into 35 page likes for a conversion ratio of 57% and a cost of $0.2857 per like.
Targeted (~240,000 users):
281 clicks that turned into 251 page likes for a conversion ratio of 89% and a cost of $0.0398 per like.
As you can see the targeted users have a higher conversion rate and a much lower cost per "like". Plus the targeted users also had a drastically higher action rate, 205 compared to 11 (action is defined as photo views and post likes after clicking ad). Which makes sense as the targeted users should be more likely to participate on your page.
One thing I'd like to point out though is that I took the targeting to an extreme. I usually try to target to 1-3 million users as that gives me a better return. For example here are the stats to another ad.
Targeted to ~2.9 million users and had a budget of $72.70:
8,603 clicks that turned into 6,789 page likes for a conversion ratio of 79% and a cost of $0.0107 per like.
*Results may vary because of your niche and ad content.
No it was over a couple days.Did you have it set to use the $10 in one day or set to run at certain times of the day?
James
No it was over a couple days.
Always ran it 24/7. If you target it right, time of day shouldn't matter much.Thanks. Is there times of the day that work better for you?
James
My problem is that at first it felt like he was trying to discredit what I was trying to say, and then he did his own test to (it's his wording, not mine) "put money where my mouth is." I can be wrong sometimes, and I can admit I am wrong, but when I have the knowledge already ready to make a response. I don't want people to be throwing "you're wrong, this is right" yadda, yadda kind of condescending posts. It rubs me the wrong way, I know DBA wasn't trying to be offensive, but these posts just rubs me the wrong way on the basis of telling the other person he's wrong in the same tone I was just saying.@carlos: It seems like you're getting a little worked up over possibly being wrong.. nothing to be upset about.. you should be happy as hell to figure out how to better grow your business/sites, regardless of how you learned it.
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