Viral Case study part 4

Was This Useful?

It’s been a couple of weeks since we last looked at the Facebook traffic case study

You can find the 3 previous parts here

Part1 | Part2 | Part3

I promised last time we spend some time looking at the website/blog part of the equation. So here it is.

Let’s first check in on where the Facebook page is at.

I have to stat a disclaimer that I actually didn’t do anything for about a week as I got caught up in life and forget about it. At some point in the last couple of weeks I slowed down the like campaign to $1 a day budget.

When you first turn on a Facebook ad they charge you more and it can take a few days for the price to come down as they see how well people are responding to your ad.

When you turn off your ad, and then you turn it back on they do the same thing. So I didn’t want to lose the hard work I’d done in tweaking the ads so for the sake of a buck a day – I decided to leave it on.

Over the weekend 2 or 3 days ago I turned the ads off completely.

likes are up to just over 5.5k and reach is up to (this week) 33k

In the last part of this series reach was over 55k but that was mostly down to the reach of the ad campaign. This reach is closer to the truth as most of this is organic reach.

As you can see below I slowed the campaign and the likes stopped growing – fast!

Then I stopped the ads completely and the ongoing likes adding stopped fast.

So I slowed the ad campaign because I wanted to test out more viral science… Basically finding topics that have gone viral and seeing if I can do the same.

Instead of posting direct to Facebook I posted all articles, videos and images to the corresponding blog instead and then posting that website post to Facebook.

This means that if someone clicked on the Facebook post they would get taken to the website.

If they clicked on the Facebook post while on their mobile they would see my website inside of the Facebook app – since Facebook now operates as it’s own browser for hosted links.

That’s good to know because based on my website google stats 80% of my traffic is mobile.

But here’s the cool thing. Because I was focusing on testing posts with cool info I had a few successes.

A success being measured but comparing how many people saw the post and how many clicks to the site I got. Anything over 7% got my attention and in a couple of cases the results were so good I then turned that post into an ad.

This meant that, knowing that the post was well received and often shared, I was capitalising on viral sharing to drive traffic to the site.

Here are some of the posts that took off – and you can see how much more engaging they were compared to the ones that did not take off.

Crazy right? It’s like there’s no middle ground – they either were winners to fizzers. I tried posting posts below 7% and it just didn’t work. The best post currently converting clicks at over 10% is still being advertised and going gangbusters.

Hence falling like growth but accelerating website traffic:

This growth over the last few days is entirely from one post that “Going Off” Like a frog in a sock.

Pose engagement has gone from 8-9c to just 3c per engagement (clicks to the site)

I have also uploaded the same video that’s in the post and tested it as a video ad on Facebook and it’s currently getting views at just 1c or less.

The great thing is this covers the paid push to these posts but does not tell the story of the viral sharing and engagement at all.

So far the ads have cost me less than $50 so all up I’m paying 1c per visitor to the site.

So what to do with these people?

Well 3 things are happening (since the weekend) behind the scenes.

1. I have a Facebook and a google retargeting pixel happening so that every one of those people who goes to the site or watches the video ad are going on a retargeting list. That mean that I can now put ads in front of those people very cheaply all over the internet (and only pay when they click of course)
2. I have just added google adsense advertising code to the site. This can take some time to take effect because google test all kinds of ads based on who they think your audience is and refine the ads over time. I have already made a few bucks from people clicking the ads but I expect that this will become more as good refine the ads and get better conversions from my audience.
3. I have just added a lead magnet and a popup squeeze form to build my email list. Unfortunately this doesn’t look they great on mobile and doesn’t convert that well – so it’s time to start messing with that so I can get that working better over the next couple of weeks.

Overall this means that there are quite a few options now for starting to make money. This whole campaign owes me around $350 so far but with 1c visitors I should be able to make that back quick smart.

Plans for the next couple of weeks.

• Find some high converting products and start advertising to my custom audiences.
• Find some click bank products to advertise on the site
• Tweak the site and the squeeze popup to get that converting better on mobile. Look at better solutions for building a mailing list from mobile. Like using a mailto link that opens the email app – pre populated with signup data.
• Keep adding to the posts to find more virally posts.

Just a few thoughts to play with. Right now I feel happy with the 1c visitor results and looking forward to seeing what I can do with them.

Have a play and see what you can come up with.