It finally happened! After waiting for the ads, they finally got approved and are live. They are, however, not doing too great.

Like any new campaign, the ads aren’t performing all that well. Facebook still seems to be trying to figure out who to show the ads to in order to get a conversion.

The ad is promoting a sale, but I have the conversion tracker set up to trigger half way through the checkout process. The reason is, at the half way point, I save their email address. Even if they don’t complete the sale, I have them added to an email list.

Realistically, I know more people will get half way and then stop than actually completing the checkout process. The idea is that the limited number of people who do complete the checkout will result in sales that will pay for the entire campaign.

So far, that’s not turning out to be true, but at least I am getting some new subscribers. I will likely continue to run the ads, even though they aren’t doing too great now, just to see how the final ad ends up.

One thing I did notice with Facebook is that the longer the ad runs, the better the targeting becomes. That means you must continue spending money until Facebook figures out who the ideal target is. There is upfront cost in trying targets who turn out to not be ideal.

Even when I get to $100 spent, I will continue to run the ad to watch the cost per conversion decrease. Early on, it will be higher than I want, and it’s really tempting to just give up on the ad. I will do some tweaking along the way, however.

I set up a few different versions of the ad and will end up killing off the poorly performing ones, but I will let at least one continue to run for some time to see what happens once the ideal target is identified.