Marketing
Posted on June 25, 2010
This last week of advertising on FaceBook has been very enlightening.
Short stats first: $110 spent yielded two DVD sales (streaming and download sales take longer to report for some reason, so data is still pending… hopefully… but not likely.)
If you haven’t considered purchasing a download, stream, or DVD of the film, please peruse the Amazon listing:
http://www.amazon.com/BackPage-Ethan-Norris/dp/B003A02O4W
http://www.amazon.com/BackPage/dp/B003DLCQEG/ref=ed_oe_vdl
(My producer, Angela Gant, needs the money so she can stay in NY.)
The sales results were expected. The ad is hampered due to its static nature. All other web advertising contains dynamic content: motion graphics, video, audio, interactivity, all the necessary tactics to attract attention. (I will attempt more frenetic advertising on entertainment sites, mostly with video from the trailer.)
What qualified it as a success was the five hundred visitors this site enjoyed over the week. The oddities continue with the dozens of visitors that found my personal site:
as they researched the film. I wonder how Angela Gant’s site fared with such additional traffic:
Initially, each campaign had a budget of $10 per day (resulting in over fifty thousand impressions per day and hundreds of click-throughs.) After two days, I’d reduce it to $5. So, now I’ve scaled back the FB ad budget to $1 per day in four markets: NY, LA and the East and West hemispheres (specifically targeting the countries of Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Spain, France, Germany, Denmark, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Great Britain respectively.)
All campaigns have targets of both men and women, ages 13-50 (except NY and LA which target ages 18-50) and who have identified themselves with interests of: filmmaking, independent film, and mockumentaries. This bring each population to approximately ten thousand people for each of the four campaigns.
Like I said, each campaign now has a daily budget of $1. I’ve bid for impressions over clicks, obviously. So, bidding an average of $.33 per one thousand impressions gives each campaign an expected minimum of fifteen thousand impressions per day. With a population of ten thousand, each campaign will have half of its citizens seeing the add twice per day (if they log onto FB twice or navigate to other pages.)
Thus far, this results in one or two click-throughs and 6-12 thousand impressions per day, per campaign. (I know, those impression numbers seem off, FB changes the value of clicks and impressions throughout the day, and has different values for different geographic markets. I wonder how much race, ethnicity,and socio-economic factors are considered in evaluating a person’s audience worth quotient. Maybe event FB activity and ad participation is measured too.)
Another day should determine the true average number of impression I should expect.
BTW, the marketing jargon “impression” simply means the act of placing the ad on a web page. (It incorrectly implies that the surfer actually looked at it and furthermore makes the outrageous suggestion that they actually saw it and regarded it.) Their other term, “click-through” is self explanatory.
Another queer item of note is the several dozen people who subscribed to my blogs via RSS feeds. Now I feel obliged to say something worthwhile for posterity (hence, this post.)
I was thrilled to see hits outside the target markets. My favorites were: Beirut, India, and Russia.
I was also clocking the film clips’ success on my youtube and vimeo accounts. The strange thing was that they were not being played, even during the heaviest traffic, when over one hundred visitors per day were viewing the clips page. My solution was to more accurately label the clips: trailer, deleted scene, outtake montage, and music video. After that, viewership climbed significantly. The punchline is that Kelley Beaman’s scene ( http://vimeo.com/6546112 ) on that page outplayed the trailer (http://vimeo.com/11013011 ) two-to-one.
What I absolutely fell in love with is the international campaigns. They were more affordable, yielded more impressions, and (most importantly) resulted in the most click-throughs (at least twice the amount of the national campaigns.) Thank you South Korea, Japan, Canada, and Italy. I owe you a Coke.
What made me want to vomit is the response I received from my neighbors in Texas. While not as expensive as LA, Texas was not worth the premium cost of impression. Click-throughs were absolutely anemic. After two days, I had the bright idea to just target Austin, the filmmaking capitol of Texas. With a population of six thousand (using the demographic parameters previously stated), the $5 per day budget yielded twelve thousand impressions (therefore numerous double exposures)… and two click-throughs. Lame. I specifically chose a Monday to perform this experiment, when most people are cruising their FB accounts at work. So no more Austin or Texas campaigns.
To conclude, I’ll leave these four campaigns trickling in at $4 per day for the next two months and see what happens.
I’ll try some guerrilla tactics next time. I’m thinking urinal screens with a picture of me on them.
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment