Marketing with Facebook - page promotion final summary Part 2.2

I concluded my previous post by talking about applying some of my lessons learned from that first ad campaign to my next campaign. In this short blog post, I will be talking about my next ad campaign to promote My Day To-Do's Facebook page. So without further a due, lets talk about it

Background

I initially thought about combining both the first post and this post into a single blog post but I thought with a 2 part post, readers can take their time to read both posts i.e. read the first one, read a logical stopping point and then move on to the next one whenever time permits. 

Foundation for campaign 2

The first ad campaign for page likes was quite a success if you consider the number of page likes, but as I discussed in the previous post, it did not help my business structure at this stage. I mean it didn't generate more revenue, cause a download spike or increase the daily active users, so for my next campaign, I decided to streamline things a bit i.e. narrow my target audience to a certain demographic.

What demographic?

The first thing that came to mind was to limit the number of regions where I would target the ad campaign, but then I thought why stop there? let's target the ads to only the females. Why? Some of the women I know have tried to use to-do list apps, they downloaded the app, learnt it, used it for a bit and then found the app a little too complicated and went back to using a pen and paper to-do list. One of my main goals while creating My Day To-Do was to create something with a very simple UI in which at least the process of adding a task to a todo list is simple and quick. On checking some of the competing apps, I believe I have been successful in that goal, but do others think that? I don't know and that was one of the reasons to create an ad campaign and make women in at least 3 countries aware of the app. So once they know about it, maybe they can try out my app and if I get lucky leave a review or give me some feedback about my app. 

Campaign 2 parameters

Countries: Australia, England(UK), USA 

Gender: Females only

Age group: All Age Groups

Budget: max $10 a day

Campaign 2 results

Age groups reached

Likes by country

Results Summary

Ages reached: An almost even spread for all ages above 18 

People reached: 593 -> 15 likes 

Total spend -> $15 (14.55)

Likes by region

USA -> 14

UK -> 1

Unfortunately My Day To-Do didn't get any likes from it's home region i.e. Australia. Owing to the (small) size of this campaign, it's actually quite difficult to do any thorough analysis from this, however I believe that this campaign did generate some legitimate likes i.e. so far the maximum downloads for this app have been from the USA, so I guess it would make sense that the maximum likes for this campaign were from USA. 

Compared to my first ad campaign I think that the second campaign was definitely more effective, I think limiting the target audience to a certain demographic certainly yields better results. I did not get a download spike during the time this ad campaign was running, but then again this campaign was mostly about testing these campaign parameters and for that reason I would consider this campaign successful. I mean by the end of it, I do know that running a campaign for a specific demographic is better. I know most of you reading would be thinking, "Wasn't that always obvious?" well it was but in this case I thought I had to give it a try and see for myself. 

Final summary 

To wrap up this Facebook page promotion saga, I will try to give an account of what I think based on both my ad campaigns.

I think that Facebook advertising is perhaps not very effective for the business structure of My Day To-Do at this stage. Why? the only way to generate any income from it via paid downloads from the app store, and at least two of my ads suggest that it is hard to achieve that with an FB ad campaign. As you may have noticed, I have specified "at this stage" in both my posts and that implies that it will be effective at some stage, so what stage is that? When I have one or all of the following

1. In-app purchases (IAP) in the Lite version: I seriously think that this would be helpful. Adding IAP to Lite has always been part of the plan but the reason why it has taken so long is because...well I am limited by the company size right now, which is just me and a good chunk of my time lately has been taken up by all this marketing tasks
2. A web version of My Day To-Do: once I have a web version running an FB campaign would mean that anyone with a device that has a web browser can potentially use the web version. In this case a FB ad campaign could potentially lead to more active users
3. Release My Day To-Do for Android: This would be the next major component in this apps lifecycle and it would be the next major component to be released after the web version.

Ohh and one more thing, this Business Insider article has come to light, apparently you can get a lot of fake likes if you target certain countries in your FB ad campaign and businesses should be very concerned about it. I do not think this applies to my first campaign, I think it was still a case of bored and teenagers liking whatever they see. Regardless, the My Day ToDo Facebook page was flooded with messages after the first ad campaign.

Conclusion

To say Facebook is huge would be an understatement, it's beyond that and it boasts an incredible number of daily active users. Therefore for someone like me who's trying to generate some revenue form his new venture, it was very important to have a look at it's advertising tools. While not beneficial at this stage for my business it was a worthwhile exercise for me as it did give me a lot to think about. For my next step in marketing My Day To-Do, I will be looking at search engine advertising via Bing and Google.

p.s. I did some search engine marketing using the Bing Ads and here's my blogpost on it.

Finally, I am working on my app full-time right now so if you find my blog posts useful and want to support me you can 

• Either buy the Pro version of My Day To-Do

• Give the Lite(free) version a try

You could also show your support by giving the My Day To-Do Facebook page a like.