A Tale of Two Advertisements
As part of our marketing push, we have a monthly giveaway where the winner gets a gift card to the local game store of their choice.
April’s winner was Jana B, who took home $100 to her LGS: Runcible Games in Rolla, Missouri.
The haul Jana picked up with her credit – that’s some pretty good taste in games
For discussion on the structure of the giveaway, and philosophy behind it, check out the write up of our March giveaway.
The Numbers
We made a couple of meaningful changes to the April giveaway, and I am pretty happy with the results. We had an average lead acquisition cost of $1.95 versus $3.52 in March. This breaks down to about a 15% break-even conversion rate.
While a 15% break-even conversion rate is a large improvement, it’s still probably a bit optimistic, and so a money losing campaign.
I would expect ~15% conversion rate for leads who explicitly expressed interest in our game (Nut Hunt), but a lower conversion rate from the giveaway - as people who want a gift card to their LGS isn’t a perfect proxy for people who are looking to add a fast-paced squirrel-placement game to their collection.
Improvements We Made to the Campaign
We made a number of changes to the campaign, that we’d talked about last month:
Increasing the gift card to $100 from $50.
We made it more obvious that you need to comment in order to enter the giveaway (in March I think a lot of people interacted with our post through “likes”, but didn’t comment).
We chose a more personable ad image (March was a generic Ticket to Ride stock image).
We kept the same chat-bot logic, and action prompts like “tag 3 friends to 10x your chances”.
Mid-way through the campaign we made a pivot that I think will be a game changer for our lead acquisition costs going forward – creating a second concurrent advertisement – with a different focus.
A Tale of Two Ads
Facebook has a number of options for how its algorithm optimizes your ad placement, depending on your goals, media, and how you are asking your audience to interact with the advertisement.
Our primary ad was an engagement post. This is a post that lives on our company page, and asks Facebook to optimize placement for interaction – likes and comments. There are a number of advantages to an engagement campaign – the engagement generated from paid advertising can be compounded by Facebook’s native algorithm, and by users sharing, or tagging their friends on the post.
It also lives on our company page – so our supporters benefit as we direct all of our mailing list subscribers to that giveaway each month (if you want to get notified, join our mailing list).
Partway through the campaign, we added a second advertisement – a Facebook message ad set.
A Facebook message ad set asks users to open a direct message with our chat bot. It skips the commenting step, so doesn’t benefit from compounding interaction, but has a clear ask, and streamlines the process.
Here’s the results of the two ads side by side.
The new message campaign has a break even implied conversion rate of about 10%. With ad spend per action of only $0.65, it should benefit from economies of scale further reducing the fixed cost per new lead.
What will you buy if you win our next giveaway?
