What I Learned from My First Wave of Facebook Advertisements

“What if I sell so many that we have to spend the weekend packing shipping envelopes?” That is what I told my girlfriend the night before I launched my first Facebook ad.  I mean I created an ingenious scheme to advertise my page and get rid of the coozies I bought off Alibaba to learn the ropes of importing Chinese goods.  How can I go wrong? If it wasn’t for my two best friends pity buying my coozies I still wouldn’t have made a sale.  After completing my first phase of Facebook advertisements it is time to look back and see what I learned.

I woke up one morning and going through my Facebook newsfeed I saw an advertisement for a Liberal Tears Coozie.  I thought the idea was funny so I clicked the link and they were selling three coozies for $15 on Amazon.  I couldn’t believe it, the design wasn’t that great and I knew how cheap it was to make coozies.  I figured this would be a great product to be my first Alibaba purchase.  After hacking away at Illustrator for a little while I came up with a Liberal Tears design that I thought was funny and I submitted a Quote Request on Alibaba to find a manufacturer.  After a quick back and forth with a supplier and some initial shock of the shipping price for air freight from China, I placed an order via Paypal.

About a week later 500 coozies arrived and completely exceeded my expectations for the quality of the product and they matched my artwork perfectly.  I thought I was in business, after paying for the shipping cost I had invested $0.58 per coozie.  I had the bright idea of offering these coozies free plus shipping.  Basically, with my first advertisement I would say I was giving the coozies away for free, just with a $2 charge to cover the shipping costs.  This $2 shipping charge would result in about a $0.50 income per coozie sold.  What an idea, I would be getting paid to advertise!  I set up my Facebook post to run the next morning and I went to bed thinking about all of the sales I would get the next day.

 

Above is the post I ran on Facebook with the targeted audience of 16-40 year old men who were interested in Rare News, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Justin Amash, Thomas Massie or Drudge Report.  I ran this Facebook ad for nearly two days at an expense of $12.38.  The general consensus people had is that they thought it was funny yet the majority did not feel they needed it.  The few people that were intrigued enough to click through to the site to order one were put off when they saw the $2 shipping charge.  One commenter was so disgusted at the $2 shipping charge he told me to stick one in an envelope and send him one.  So I asked him for his address and I did just that.  My two best friends were nice enough to buy some from my site.  Two days and $12.38 invested in marketing and I have only given away one coozie without charging for shipping.  At 1,657 impressions, I paid $0.0075 per impression and $0.083 per engagement with my post.  No new sales but I now have a baseline with what to expect.

Now that my friends had some coozies in hand they started sending some pictures.  One friend sent me this meme he created and I figured it would make a perfect picture for an ad.  I took the picture and included the text: “The people have spoken, it turns out nobody likes to pay $2 to ship a “free” coozie. We are no longer using Bernie Sanders math. We are selling all coozies for $1 with free shipping! visit RattlerLTD.com now to order your Liberal Tears Coozie.”

It was time to admit I screwed up with the original pricing and I was making it right.  One dollar is about the cost it takes to mail a coozie so I would not be making any money in the deal but I wanted to see if I could move some coozies.  Unfortunately, changing the pricing did not work to sell coozies but people really seemed to take to the advertisement.  I did get some great reactions to the ad and some insight into why nobody wanted my coozies.

 

My advertisement performed well from a reach standpoint.  I am not sure if I can believe Facebook’s marketing but they told me it was performing better than 95% of other similar ads.  I set a budget of $15 for the ad, but Facebook decided it was against their advertising policy before it could finish.  The advertisement was approved 4 times previously by the Facebook staff but I guess you can’t please all of the west coast liberals.  With 4,204 impressions at a cost of $0.0035 per impression and a cost of $0.011 per engagement, my impression cost was reduced significantly with a slightly higher engagement cost.  I ran this advertisement to all genders instead of just men at my girlfriend’s suggestion so I think that is the reason for the higher engagement cost.

I think this comment sums up my difficulty actually selling my product.  People love to share and like my coozie in their echo chamber of Facebook.  While my product may be a great gag gift that people find funny, it would be very divisive and off-putting in public.  Even without selling any coozies, this has been a good way to generate likes, fans, and new followers while at the same time learning how to market on Facebook.  I think my next steps are to try selling these on Amazon, while I try marketing my page on other platforms to new audiences.  My other products will be getting delivered in the coming weeks so I should have more opportunities to advertise and make my first real sale.