Example of a FanBox Ad That Fails & Reading Stats!
If you're going to run ads, they can be your best friend for making money on FanBox or they can absolutely work against you if you don't watch them.
And by watching your ads, I mean watch your ads stats under the "Share" tab in your dashboard.
Seriously, that's all you need to do is look at your ad stats.
[update] Since the launch of Knowledge Investor, this article has become somewhat obsolete. FanBox now only reports one graph (click rate), so you don't need to learning to read a Cost Per Click (CPC) or Ads Served because those graphs are no longer part of your stats.
ALSO, I highly recommend you go back and create an ad for every post you have and let Knowledge Investor fund it. You still earn on the traffic driven to your posts via ads whether you fund them or Knowledge Investor does.
FanBox runs roughly 24 hours behind on reporting earnings and stats so I usually run an ad for 3 solid days before I make the decision whether or not to continue funding that particular ad.
Here's the basics on what you need to know:
Okay I'm going to show you an example of an ad that doesn't do well and the reasons why so you learn to run successful ads that really perform for you. Read why this ad fails.
Ready?
Okay!
Here is the ad I want to run.
I like this post - it's a great story about a great lady that basically died unsung and without a Nobel Peace Prize for saving 2500 children (at least) and she buried their personal information in jars on her property so she could find their relatives after the war and reunite them. She was caught, beaten, had bones broken and STILL wouldn't give up where those jars were. Great lady with an inspiring story!
And by watching your ads, I mean watch your ads stats under the "Share" tab in your dashboard.
Seriously, that's all you need to do is look at your ad stats.
[update] Since the launch of Knowledge Investor, this article has become somewhat obsolete. FanBox now only reports one graph (click rate), so you don't need to learning to read a Cost Per Click (CPC) or Ads Served because those graphs are no longer part of your stats.
ALSO, I highly recommend you go back and create an ad for every post you have and let Knowledge Investor fund it. You still earn on the traffic driven to your posts via ads whether you fund them or Knowledge Investor does.
FanBox runs roughly 24 hours behind on reporting earnings and stats so I usually run an ad for 3 solid days before I make the decision whether or not to continue funding that particular ad.
Here's the basics on what you need to know:
Okay I'm going to show you an example of an ad that doesn't do well and the reasons why so you learn to run successful ads that really perform for you. Read why this ad fails.
Ready?
Okay!
Here is the ad I want to run.I like this post - it's a great story about a great lady that basically died unsung and without a Nobel Peace Prize for saving 2500 children (at least) and she buried their personal information in jars on her property so she could find their relatives after the war and reunite them. She was caught, beaten, had bones broken and STILL wouldn't give up where those jars were. Great lady with an inspiring story!
So I set up an ad, you know the drill and I set my budget to $30 a day and my bidding was set to "Automatic".
I went to the tag cloud and chose some very popular tags.
I set the time span for this ad to run for 3 days.
Here is how the first 2 days went.
Ad Click Rate is the first graph you see on your ad stats.
Basically this tells you how popular your ad is with the fine folks on FanBox.
On September 5th my click through rate was 0.07% then on September 6th it was 0.20%. Click throughs are goingUP.
But that can be deceptive and when you read the REST of the stats below you will see what I mean.
See that little green line on the graph going UP. That's how you can tell at a glance.
Remember, FanBox runs 24 hours or so behind on reporting stats so day 3 of my ad isn't reported yet.
On September 7th I'll check the stats and see if the clicks are still going up (and the other 2 graphs we're going to cover show us good info) the ad will be funded for 3 more days. If they go down. I will kill this ad and either create another one for this post or just create an ad for a whole new post.
The next part of your ad graph is FanBox Ads Served. This shows you how many ads the system served up for people to click on. Basically when you first run an ad (and you're about to see a great example of this) the system will serve up a LOT of impressions for your ad. This is because the system is actually testing to see how popular your ad actually is for each of those tags you chose to describe the ad.
I went to the tag cloud and chose some very popular tags.
I set the time span for this ad to run for 3 days.
Here is how the first 2 days went.
Ad Click Rate is the first graph you see on your ad stats.
Basically this tells you how popular your ad is with the fine folks on FanBox.
On September 5th my click through rate was 0.07% then on September 6th it was 0.20%. Click throughs are goingUP.But that can be deceptive and when you read the REST of the stats below you will see what I mean.
See that little green line on the graph going UP. That's how you can tell at a glance.
Remember, FanBox runs 24 hours or so behind on reporting stats so day 3 of my ad isn't reported yet.
On September 7th I'll check the stats and see if the clicks are still going up (and the other 2 graphs we're going to cover show us good info) the ad will be funded for 3 more days. If they go down. I will kill this ad and either create another one for this post or just create an ad for a whole new post.
The next part of your ad graph is FanBox Ads Served. This shows you how many ads the system served up for people to click on. Basically when you first run an ad (and you're about to see a great example of this) the system will serve up a LOT of impressions for your ad. This is because the system is actually testing to see how popular your ad actually is for each of those tags you chose to describe the ad.
The Click Through Rate (that would be the Ad Click Rate) on your ad is carefully calculated and then the FanBox computer will adjust the impressions to reflect the actual popularity of your ad.
Let's see what we can learn from our FanBox Ads Served graph. Now notice the slide downhill on this graph for my ad.
This is not good.
During
the first day when the computer was learning the popularity of my ad, it served up 2,759 impressions of my ad (I jokingly refer to this as "the honeymoon period" for my ads), because I only had a click through rate of 0.07%, the computer ascertained this post was not that popular and lowered the impressions on September 6 to a whopping 64.
I can do a couple of things at this point. I can wait one more day to see if the ad pulls up in ads served or I can go ahead and kill that ad and just create another one that will be more enticing for people to click.
Often it's not the post - it's just that people weren't enticed to click by your ad.
In this case, I'm going to wait one more day to see if it pulls up. A dance like this isn't uncommon in my ads and I've them go to low impressions then bounce back the next day.
Okay, let look at the final graph. Cost Per Click (CPC). In a nutshell this is telling you how much each click
cost you.
On September 5th my clicks were $14.40 per click.
Obviously I only got 2 clicks which cost me $28.80 (my budget was $30 for the day remember). Getting so few clicks drove down the popularity of this ad.
If you want to know how many people clicked on your ads - just take the number off FanBox Ads Served and multiply this with your Ad Click Rate percentage.
In my case it would be 2759 x 0.07%=how many people clicked my ad.
Now let me show you where I failed on this ad.
I told you in the beginning these facts about setting up this ad:I set my budget to $30 a day and my bidding was set to "Automatic".
I went to the tag cloud and chose some very popular tags.
I set the time span for this ad to run for 3 days.
Fail #1 - I should have set my initial daily budget higher here .
Trouble is I hit the wall for my daily budget after 2 clicks.
Let's see what we can learn from our FanBox Ads Served graph. Now notice the slide downhill on this graph for my ad.
This is not good.
During
the first day when the computer was learning the popularity of my ad, it served up 2,759 impressions of my ad (I jokingly refer to this as "the honeymoon period" for my ads), because I only had a click through rate of 0.07%, the computer ascertained this post was not that popular and lowered the impressions on September 6 to a whopping 64.I can do a couple of things at this point. I can wait one more day to see if the ad pulls up in ads served or I can go ahead and kill that ad and just create another one that will be more enticing for people to click.
Often it's not the post - it's just that people weren't enticed to click by your ad.
In this case, I'm going to wait one more day to see if it pulls up. A dance like this isn't uncommon in my ads and I've them go to low impressions then bounce back the next day.
Okay, let look at the final graph. Cost Per Click (CPC). In a nutshell this is telling you how much each click
cost you.On September 5th my clicks were $14.40 per click.
Obviously I only got 2 clicks which cost me $28.80 (my budget was $30 for the day remember). Getting so few clicks drove down the popularity of this ad.
If you want to know how many people clicked on your ads - just take the number off FanBox Ads Served and multiply this with your Ad Click Rate percentage.
In my case it would be 2759 x 0.07%=how many people clicked my ad.
Now let me show you where I failed on this ad.
I told you in the beginning these facts about setting up this ad:I set my budget to $30 a day and my bidding was set to "Automatic".
I went to the tag cloud and chose some very popular tags.
I set the time span for this ad to run for 3 days.
Fail #1 - I should have set my initial daily budget higher here .
Trouble is I hit the wall for my daily budget after 2 clicks.
Fail #2 - I chose VERY competitive tags (hence the high dollar clicks). Don't get me wrong, it's good to choose a few really popular tags IF they fit the content of your post just be prepared for higher dollar clicks and adjust your daily budget for that ad accordingly.
There are a lot of people buying ads that use the tags children, women, inspiration. That means unless my ad happened to get a killer click through rate - it wouldn't be served up as much for those tags where there were more popular ads using those same tags that got a better click through rate than I did.
There's no way I could have gotten a killer click through rate on a $30 daily budget at $14 a click.
Even with an ad that wasn't my best effort, my earnings for September 5th were $82.
I can live with that.
September 6th stats haven't been reported yet so I don't know how the next day went but I can tell you right now, if they went down (and I'm almost 100% certain they did)- I'm killing this ad and creating another one :).
There are a lot of people buying ads that use the tags children, women, inspiration. That means unless my ad happened to get a killer click through rate - it wouldn't be served up as much for those tags where there were more popular ads using those same tags that got a better click through rate than I did.
There's no way I could have gotten a killer click through rate on a $30 daily budget at $14 a click.
Even with an ad that wasn't my best effort, my earnings for September 5th were $82.
I can live with that.
September 6th stats haven't been reported yet so I don't know how the next day went but I can tell you right now, if they went down (and I'm almost 100% certain they did)- I'm killing this ad and creating another one :).
