Using a Facebook Ad to Test Your Idea for Less Than $15

Facebook Ad Graphic

I often answer questions from entrepreneurs who are not currently my clients. One question I answered recently was “how do I go about raising prices with an existing client?”

When I answered the question I thought, “I get this question often, so I’ll turn this answer into a blog post.” As I wrote the blog post I thought, “This might be a hot topic for an opt-in offer, and if I get a lot of people opting in, perhaps this is a topic for a paid virtual workshop.”

But before I spent a lot of time developing a virtual workshop, I wanted to test the topic and see if it was as hot as I thought it might be. Using a Facebook Ad to test your idea is quick and inexpensive.

Step by Step Facebook Ad Test

So, here are the steps I took to test my “how to increase prices for existing clients” idea with a Facebook ad.

1. I took the written answer I had created for the person who first asked the question, expanded it, and turned it into a blog post.
2. Using that content, I expanded it just a bit more, put it into a Resource Guide, and added links to ten good articles online about how to increase pricing.
3. I developed a cover graphic for the Resource Guide.
4. We put together an opt-in offer at the bottom of the blog post to let readers know they could grab the resource guide (for free). (Click here to see what the blog post and the opt-in offer looks like.)
5. We set up a separate segment of my house list for the people who did take this opt-in offer so that we could track how many readers were interested in this topic. (I use Aweber for my autoresponder and e-mail system.)
6. Quite a few people did want the opt-in of the “How to Raise Your Prices with Existing Clients” Resource Guide, so based on that I decided to test whether more entrepreneurs would find this product and maybe a future workshop helpful.
7. We used the same cover graphic and developed a graphic for a Facebook ad (the graphic in this blog post is a copy of the Facebook graphic).
8. I first placed a $5.00 ad on Facebook and decided to run it to cold traffic, meaning that I used the demographic of people I typically serve but not to anyone who already knows me. I wanted to see the usefulness of this topic to women entrepreneurs who don’t know me at all.
9. As the first ad ran (for 3 days) I realized we had messed up – I was running the ad to the blog post rather than to a pure opt-in page. Why is this a mistake? Because people who clicked through then had to search for the opt-in at the bottom of my blog post rather than being led to the opt-in right away. (Never make people click twice when you can simplify and let them click only once!)
10. We corrected the ad by setting up a solo opt-in page and changing the link in the Facebook ad to the new page (you can see the new opt-in page here.)
11. Because of the mess up we made I decided to put $10 more into the (now corrected) Facebook ad and run it for a total of 5 days.

Lessons Learned

• Overall, we got a 2% click through rate for the ad. A good rule of thumb is a 3% click through, so the ad was not performing well in terms of conversion to the Resource Guide.
• In total, we got 85 clicks to The Confident Marketer website, but out of those 85 clicks only 17 people actually downloaded the resource guide. This tells me that, at least for women entrepreneurs who don’t know me at all, raising prices is not something they want help with right now.
• We only paid 17 cents per click, so the cost effectiveness of the ad was excellent (total ad spend was $14.45). For less than $15 we found out that developing a product or a workshop about increasing prices for existing clients isn’t a hot enough topic to pursue, and we sent 85 brand new people to The Confident Marketer website.

What Else Should I Keep in Mind?

• I rarely run an ad to completely cold traffic, and many people will tell you not to do that at all. If I had run the same ad to people who already know me the click through rate would probably have been higher. But I wanted to experiment and get my name out to women entrepreneurs who didn’t know me.
• Just because a Facebook ad doesn’t perform well doesn’t mean my topic was bad. It could be the graphic was not interesting. It could be that my title was not compelling. It could be that I chose my audience demographics and interests badly. It could be that the opt-in page was not interesting enough to hold a person’s attention once she got there. But overall, a title about price increases didn't interest women entrepreneurs who saw this ad.
• All business is an imperfect experiment and people’s needs change. I could run the ad in 4 months and get different results.
• The 85 clicks from cold traffic DID increase my visibility and name recognition to brand new prospects, and helped to build my retargeting audience for future Facebook ads.

Running a low-cost ad in Facebook is a great way to get feedback on your business ideas. It’s definitely worth it to me to spend less than $15 and find out that this topic is a yawner. Have you tested one of your ideas with a Facebook ad before? If so, I’d love to hear your results, so post a comment here to let me know!

If you’d like a copy of the How To Increase Your Prices with Existing Clients Resource Guide you can go to the opt-in page and grab a copy now.

(PS – the link to Aweber here and above is my own affiliate link.)