“Corrected Transcript:
Yeah, okay. Now that we have our Facebook headset set up and configured, a funnel structured, and our venues edited, everything is hunky-dory. Now we need to do a little bit of arithmetic about ad schedules, ad costs, and budgets. So let’s work through this.
Let’s go back and start with the content promotion Kanban board in our persona. Earlier, we made a choice about how often we’re going to post content to our blog and how often we’re going to promote content or amplify content on Facebook. Let’s assume for the moment that we’re only posting one new skyscraper article daily to our blog, and we’re promoting that and also amplifying it on Facebook. Whether it’s noon or nine in the morning doesn’t matter. Let’s say that we’re doing this at a rate of one per day. We’ll get to more complex cases in just a moment. So let’s start with that. That means we’re doing one new post per day on Facebook. Great.
Now let’s talk about promoting that in terms of ads. Our venues are already set up, so we don’t have to do anything with that. Let’s go to our ads manager and make sure we’ve got our three campaigns, and there’s one ad set in each campaign. Each one of those ad sets has a daily budget associated with it. When we set up the funnel, it automatically sets up each one of these ad sets to the minimum daily spend required on Facebook. For US dollars, it’s one dollar. For other countries, it’s going to be some other number, like Canadian dollars, which I think is like a dollar thirty-seven or something like that when stated in US dollars. ResultFlow goes out and finds out what the minimum is and uses that minimum. You can change that just by editing the budget.
It is possible for Facebook to spend as much as $2 a day. My experience is that when you’re first starting out, it won’t have a wide enough audience to actually spend all of that money. But it could spend that much. So you’ll have to experiment, and I encourage you to experiment at low numbers rather than big numbers.
Since there are three ad sets, and we have all three of them turned on, we can’t spend less than $1 a day on any one ad set. So our minimum spend is going to be $3 a day if we have all of them turned on. Initially, you’re not even going to spend any money on traffic because you have no traffic to the blog yet, nobody on Facebook has been pixeled, and assuming it’s a new site, you have nobody in this group. So you can leave these turned on at a dollar a day because as soon as they start spending money, it means the size of the audience is above some magic threshold, which is like a hundred.
You’re only really going to be spending money into your cold audience, which is everybody except these. Since these are zero, it’s going to be everybody that fits the audience targeting. So you’re not really going to spend your budget initially. But at the same time, you can use a dollar just to make sure everything is working properly before risking more dollars than that.
So we’re going to spend possibly $3 a day on our three audiences. But that’s per day. So for any one post, if we have one post per day to our blog, do we want to promote each one of those for just one day? Usually no, because it takes longer for the Facebook algorithm to learn who to present that to. So we want to take each post we have on a one-day-per-day basis. Let’s say we post on a Monday, we want that to run for some portion of the day on Monday, Tuesday, and maybe even Wednesday. So let’s go over and look at our venues, which is where we control that. When we first set these up, I left these set to three days, and that’s just a nice round number. Setting it to one day is too short because Facebook needs some time to optimize the targeting. Ten days is way too long because you’ll see the performance peak within two or three days and then fall off rapidly. So three days is a good general rule.
Now, in three days, we have a total of three posts and each of those posts lasts three days and spends potentially as much as a dollar a day. So you have to multiply those out, and you get nine dollars a day. It won’t ever spend that much, especially at first. You’ll be able to catch it early before it would ever get around to spending nine dollars. And particularly, even at the best case scenario, every single post is not going to spend nine dollars because when it first goes live, Facebook doesn’t have any data on it, doesn’t have any history. So it might actually spend less, like 50 cents, a dollar and 70 cents, or it might spend 50 cents, a dollar and 20 cents because Facebook figured out it was not performing well and stopped sending impressions. You’re going to see this arc for every single post. It’s going to be a little bit different.
If it looks like it’s been 50 cents and then a dollar, and then 80 cents, maybe you should extend the duration to four days instead of three. You’re going to have to adjust that. There are no magic rules here. All you have to do is look at them and figure out on average what they’re doing.
Like right now, one of my sites I’ve set to two dollars a day, and I’m posting four times a day. But in the month of May, it still only spent about a dollar a day because no one post did that well and had enough time in the market with, I think, three days. So no post ever did well enough that I was spending eight dollars a day.
So, pick nice round numbers. Three days is a good number to get started. One dollar a day will at least do something. And then we’ll show you in different videos how to optimize that a little bit better. But as a starting point, this is a great place to be.”
