Facebok Advertising Review

I'm had a lot of business owners who are interested in Facebook Ads (I'll shorten as FB Ads going forward) in advertising their business so today I wanted to do a quick write up to provide some answers to the question of if Facebook Ads is any good.

The answer (as always), is it depends.

Facebook Ads, a brief introduction:

FB Ads is one of the largest and most used online advertising platforms today. To start, you will need a FB account. Once you login, you'll have the options of creating a 'campaign'. A campaign is simply an advertising 'plan' you'll run and manage. Under this 'plan' or campaign, you'll be able to create your ads and select your audiences (who you want to targeted with your ads).

A quick aside:

I won't go through the whole setup tutorial, but here's a few good Facebook Ad tutorials I'd recommend:

https://www.oberlo.ca/blog/the-beginners-guide-to-facebook-advertising
https://neilpatel.com/what-is-facebook-advertising/
https://adespresso.com/guides/facebook-ads-beginner/facebook-manager-campaign-setup/

Oberlo's guide is fairly straight forward and great for beginners, where as I've personally used some of Neil Patel's guides. His guides are very complete and provides a holistic view of everything you need to know to get the job done. Adespresso has a large selection of guides, the the quality is fairly poor and I find their writing seem to ramble on without getting to the point. It seems like they're writing for the sake of putting words out, instead of teaching something. You'll find a lot of guides from them on Google (they're good at SEO), but I'd avoid them if you can.

Back to our review:

Facebook Ad's main competitive advantage isn't their campaign manager (I find it slow and bulky compared to Google Adwords), but rather, their audience selection platform. Facebook dissects their audience into distinct pieces and serves them up on a platter for you.

For example, let's say you sell custom painted mugs and want to use FB Ads to promote your ecommerce store. In FB Ads, you have the option of:

1. Selecting once users in NYC can see your ads
2. Only females can see your ads
3. Only females with an income of 50k+/year can see your ads

Once you select a general 'pool' of potential customers, you may want to look for affinity:

From the above selection, you can further define your audience as:

1. Only users who:
i. are writers
ii. are office workers
iii. are teachers
2. Only users who:
i. are part of writing groups on FB
ii. are part of teacher groups on FB
3. Only users who:
i. have an affinity for coffee
ii. have an affinity for tea
iii. have an affinity for hard liquor (if you think your customers would use a mug for vodka, who knows)

The best part of FB Ads is that while you're defining who can see your ads, FB will also provide you a 'count' of how many actual customers are available under the defined criteria you've provided. Do note that the more defined you get, the smaller your potential pool of customers. Hence for our example, I picked NYC instead of Athens, Ohio.

Overall we give Facebook Ads a 10/10. This isn't to say FB Ads can't get better, I'm sure it will, but in terms of the competition, it's truly incredible what FB offers compared to the competition.

Full disclaimer, in giving FB a 10/10, we do not think it's better than Google Ads. We simply think they're equally good, and Google Ads would likely receive a 10/10 in our books as well.

Winterplay Studios Review - Is it any good?

We recently tried Winterplay Studio's traffic services for one of our blogs as way of kickstarting the new blog and get a starting visitor base. This review covers our thoughts on Winterplay's traffic services as well as some competitors readers should take note of.

Winterplay's Traffic Service, a brief overview

So unlike most other traffic services, Winterplay's website promotion all lasts for 30 days by default. When I spoke with Amanda (one of their reps), she mentioned this is to ensure the traffic is more organic than simply blasting a site with the full visitor count.

I'm fairly content with this, mainly because running a 30 day campaign helps a website owner setup, optimize and make changes based on the visitors and their behaviors. So for this part of their traffic service, I think it makes a lot of sense and it's clear they've given their traffic plans some thought in making it useful for customers.

Their plans are structured into 'tiers', starting with 'tier 1', running up to 'tier 2'. Each tier allows you to provide up to 3 keywords they'll use to promote your website (think of these as keywords used in backlinks - they're used to help you get visitors that are interested in your business), but all tiers last 30 days by default. Customers can order a recurring order and receive a discount on future orders which means you won't need to place a new order each day.

The main difference between plans is the amount of visitors provided per plan. For example, Tier 1 offers 200 daily visitors for 30 days, for a total of around 6,000 visitors through the life of the campaign. Tier 1.2 offers 400 daily visitors, and so on.

So to recap, Winterplay's traffic services offers different 'tiered' plans, all are 30 days promotions and the plans differ mostly by the number of visitors you get from the plan.

What We Thought Of Their Services

So before we talk about our usecase and why we purchased their plans, I need to provide some context towards how we used it. We recently opened a new ecommerce business and a website for the business. This business primarily sells small trinkets and we wanted to buy some traffic to start promoting the business and get some warm leads.

We weren't expecting anything in particular from this service except for was promised: a set number of daily visitors for 30 days that are relatively interested in our services.

Okay onto the review: We purchased a Tier 1.2 plan (due to relatively better value), and used an emailed coupon to get 15% off ("WELCOME15" if anyone wants to use it). This plan gave us 400 daily visitors for 30 days, so a around 12,000 total through the life of the plan.

We placed our order on a Tuesday and started seeing the visitors by around Friday, this is fairly inline with their confirmation email which said traffic will begin in 2 - 3 days. Once the traffic began, we also received an email from them with a tracking URL for our order. This tracking URL allowed us to see daily visitors. And from here on out, our campaign ran for the entire 30 days and finished after that. We did not need to email them to 'cancel' anything.

Overall we were fairly happy with the traffic, but with a few caveats.

What was good:

1. We got what we bought, around 12,000 visitors came to our website and a lot of clicks
2. The ordering process and communication was simple and easy to use, their reps are friendly and we found them helpful.
3. They're based in NY and Canada. Most traffic services are from overseas like India, which is difficult when communicating with their reps and can also be a bit sketchy, we liked Winterplay as they're much more reputable.
4. Very cheap: this is the most important factor and likely the reason why we'll use them again (likely on a recurring plan for the discounts). Their services are very affordable compared to the alternatives. For an American company, it's difficult to find better 'value' out there.

What could be better:

1. The tracking URL they provided for our plan was fairly basic. We needed to track conversions and use attribution and this wasn't possible with the tracking link they provided. We primarily used Google Analytics with URL attribution and mostly ignored their tracking tool. If you have a fairly simple business or website, their tracking URL is fine. But if you needed more advanced visitor tracking, we recommend installing Google Analytics and use that instead.
2. Lower conversion rates. We found the traffic yielded lower conversion rates than what we were used to seeing from Google organic traffic or targeted social marketing like Instagram influencers and Facebook campaigns. This lower conversion rate was largely offset by the low price of their plans however.
3. Support. We mostly received emails back from their support team within a day, but being able to get same day responses would have been better.

Alternatives to Winterplay's traffic service:

Google Adwords: This is our primary bread and butter when it comes to our past experience in running 'traditional' internet advertising. Compared with Winterplay's plans, Google Ads is much more complicated to setup, much more expensive and offers a steeper learning curve. The upside is that Google Ads yielded higher conversions. Whether or not it's worth it, depends on your CPA (cost per acquisition), and RPU (revenue per user). If the conversions are high but you're selling $5 products, it may not be worth while. Overall, we would still highly recommend at least trying Google Ads to see if the numbers work for your individual use cases.

Facebook Ads: Facebook Ads have been a very interesting channel for us because it works exceptionally well for some products and services while being extremely bad for others. To put some context around this: one business owner who sells 3D printed figurines (with an avg selling price of around $25 each) was able to generate a CPA of around $11/lead. This meant a profit margin of $14. While on the other hand, we've seen folks getting CPA in the hundreds. Facebook offers an exceptional toolkit of audience targeting options and selections, so it's important that if you use Facebook, to setup your campaign well. Despite the extremes with FB Ads, we still recommend trying it in conjunction with Winterplay, and Google's Ad services to see which one has the highest return on your money spent.

Conclusion:

We think overall Winterplay's Traffic Service deserves a 8.5/10 primarily because of:

1. Highly affordable traffic plans
2. Simple to use and great for beginner marketers
3. Great support
4. Based in US & Canada

We also recommend using other traffic tools in conjunction in an effort to find the best traffic sources for the product/services you're looking to promote.