Hi Karen,

Steve here.  John is travelingand I wanted to help you get some answers in the meantime, but let's take your questions one by one...

1)  Dynamic content is so that you can test different elements within the same ad.  For instance, you can test two different headlines within the same ad to see which gets a better response from within your target audience.  This doesn't have much bearing on actual conversions, but rather how well the ad performs (Clicks, click through rate, cost per click, relevance score).

2)  If the other Karen Grace is in fact no longer doing anything, then you can realistically begin to start to claim some of those search results, simply by creating more and more content.

3)  Yes, it's totally appropriate to attribute that quote to someone in Elbow, if they did in fact give you that quote and if you feel that Elbow are going to help you win over your visitors, even if the person who gave the quote is no longer with them.

Let us know if we can ever help with anything else.

If t was me, I would start the marketing now and not worry as much about the search issue. As I mentioned, the lions share of your results will not be from organic traffic but from traffic that you personally push.

There is a lesson on Youtube optimization here in the IC that you might find helpful. It's three or four years old and I haven't used the strategy in a while, but I believe the fundamentals are still effective, though possibly the best link packages have changed. Doesn't require much to test it though.

- I think you said somewhere John, that around $200 /4-5 days of running an ad would give me an idea of conversion rates. I wonder now whether you meant conversions as in subscribers to my list, or customers of my album. Basically my immediate goal is to see if my funnel breaks even with my album, so I would hope to get say 200 subscribers, and 20 sales with the above investment. If this works (perhaps after some tweaking) I would be over the moon, and go about creating some kind of upsell (after quizzing people as to what kind of thing they might buy) before I seriously hit the online road with this. So my question is, do you think around $200 initial investment will give me a good sense of whether my 1-album-funnel is generally likely to break even? Or should I spend more to be more sure of a scalable success rate ?

In an ideal world the numbers you outlined would work. However, that would require everything to go perfectly. In order to get 200 subs for $200 you need to acquire them for $1 each. That usually takes some real tweaking. And to get 20 sales would require a 10% conversion rate to sales. That is totally doable, but that is the very high side of what is normal. So long story short, I would expect to go through a fair bit of testing before you will ever see numbers as optimal as those. It's possible you never will. Often the profit comes from the upsell and subsequent promotions.

- Lastly, have you seen any detrimental effect using fb ads since the algorythms have been changing recently, and with all the cambridge analytica stuff? Does your 'what is normal?' video still apply?

I have not noticed any obvious changes to FB ads or the results of my campaigns. I'll keep you posted if I do.

Honestly, if money is tight I would stick with traffic for now. It takes a lot more money to optimize for conversions. My personal feeling is that every artist should just forgo their daily starbucks routine (or their equivalent) and dedicate at least $5 day to driving traffic. You may not make your money back right away but you will start to understand the process and their WILL be momentum. You will get a feel for what works and what doesn't and the daily engagement from new fans will be very motivating, even if the immediate ROI is not. Once your metrics are at least looking positive, you can turn the budget up and really dial things in. That's just my two cents.

Did you send the DTFI inquiry via the DTFI website or to me via email? I have gone through all of the emails and have responded to everyone. I did not notice one from you. But my partner is received all of the inquiries that came in through the site so if you submitted there then that's why I haven't seen it. But if it was the former then perhaps resend to john@www.mmmanifesto.com and put DTFI in the headline.  

Hi Karen,

Your understanding about how it works is correct except for the fact that in the examples I have given the "conversions" we are optimizing for are subscribers rather than sales. Sales would be better but you will need at least 35 sales a week (give or take) in order to use that metric. So for most, optimizing for leads is the way to go.

However, running traffic is not about just testing the ad. It is still about getting conversions. The algorithm is just not as honed in as it would be if you were optimizing for leads. But that doesn't mean it's not effective. You are optimizing for traffic simply because your budget is not large enough to give the algorithm enough data (about 5 actions a day). But you can still absolutely convert well using traffic as the metric.

Hope that helps.

Hi Karen,

I will answer in context.

Karen Grace said

1. What’s the difference between link clicks and landing page views, and which should I select ?

2. Do i need to change anything on ...

'bid strategy'

'when you get charged'

'delivery type’ ?

3. I'm starting with just one ad set for a simple start- going after Lisa Hannigan fans. This is partly because my music is comparable to hers, and also because I worked with producer Iain Archer who also worked with Lisa Hannigan, and I have quotes by him that should capture her fan's attention- I have a strong gut instinct there.

I'm trying to follow your advice from the other facebook tutorials, where you say that an audience of 200,000 - 1.2 million is ideal. Now Lisa Hannigan has 150,000 page likes, so I was thinking it would be good to just target all her fans for the moment! But I can't see how I can do that? Even when I put in 'Europe, US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand' and have a pretty broad age range, the potential reach is just 61,000 people. Why does this happen and is it a problem? What do I need to consider here?

There are other singer-songwriters I could go after, with bigger audiences. Eg:

Regina Spektor – 1.6m likes

Feist- 1m likes

Agnes Obel - 320,000 likes

4. Should I perhaps do two other ad sets with two of the above, also using dynamic creative? Would this triple the budget? (Excuse novice questions!)

 

5. My photos seem to lose quality when I upload them?(see attached screen shot) Is that just when they're in the ad manager and they'll look better in newsfeeds ? Should my photo files be bigger/ better quality?

 

6. Lastly, I'm thinking about my Iain Archer quotes (the producer I worked with.) Aside from putting Lisa Hannigan in the brackets, I'm wondering who else to include as he's worked with some quite big names, like Snow Patrol. I was thinking of adding Snow Patrol in the bracket for name dropping reasons, because I was thinking there's something in the clout of that (?) but perhaps instead I should include Lissie who is less known, but a singer-songwriter, albeit one who is much more mainstream than me and we'd have different fans I reckon. Similar with Jake Bugg- people who have heard of him think he's cool, but he's only loosely a similar audience to me... Do you have any thoughts, or does it not matter too much as long as I get Lisa Hannigan in there for that target audience?

Click here to listen to the refreshing sound of Karen Grace: ‘songs that are both playfully intense and intensely playful’.  -Iain Archer (Lisa Hannigan, Snow Patrol, Jake Bugg.)

 

My pleasure. Good luck!

Hi Karen,

I have posted my answers below. If possible, in the future please ask one question per thread. By creating a unique thread headline for each question, other users can better find the info they need and it makes the forum more searchable. It also helps me answer in piecemeal, rather than needing to dedicating an entire 20 minutes or so to one response. I tend to pop in and out throughout the day. Hope you don't mind.

Karen Grace said
Thanks for your thorough, timely response John. 

I will target multiple different audiences as you advise. 

OK, questions:

1. I'm still a little confused about the discrepancy between total facebook audience of an artist, and potential reach. You say it's because of my demographic limitations, but even when I set the age range to 13 - 65+ and put 'worldwide' for the geographic area, facebook seems to still only set around half (sometimes less) of the total audience as the 'potential reach' number. I've tried a few different artists, and that generally seems to be the case. It'd be great to understand this, as I like having a really good left brain understanding as well as working with instincts, where possible. 

I am seeing the exact opposite. My estimated reach is much larger than the audience size and I have confirmed with a few peers that they are seeing the same thing. That said, FB's estimated reach tool has been broken for the last few weeks. This has to do with the whole Cambridge analytics thing. But they say that the ads are still going out to the right people. Bugs like this are surprisingly common with FB.

2. Related to this, I'm interested in you saying an audience of 200,000- 1.2 million is ideal. You mentioned that if the audience is too small, you cycle through it way too quickly, (I imagine this is especially not great if using dynamic creative as you're giving facebook more complex stuff to cycle through ?) and if too large, it will be too broad.

Because my singer-songwriter style is I guess pretty niche in the grand scheme of things, after quite some brainstorming, the only singer- songwriter that I think I vibe with that has a big audience is Regina Spektor (see stats below). Two others I think are worth trying are Agnes Obel and Lisa Hannigan. As mentioned last week, I think LH is highly targeted because of name dropping reasons, and because I think we're genuinely comparable. I imagine you'd advise going for a mixture of more targetted interests (even if small audiences) and also a bigger target audience, too?  

Regina spektor -potential reach: 310,000 for age 25-60 worldwide.

Agnes Obel -potential reach: 120,000 age 25-60 worldwide.

Lisa Hannigan -potential reach: 60,000 for age 25-60 worldwide.

I got an estimated reach of 170,000 for Regina Spektor within the US, for ages 25 and up. This would be enough to warrant a $15/day ad spend. I didn't look at the others. But I can guarantee you that there are also going to be broader audiences that will also work. It's just a matter of brainstorming, researching, surveying, and testing.

3. You mentioned you need to be spending at least $10 a day to bother going for 'conversion' ads- does that mean $10 on each ad set or $10 total a day on the campaign?

Correct, per ad set.

4. Lastly, I'm still trying to look into improving the quality of my images once uploaded to fb ads manager (hopefully my image has attached this time?) The image size is correct, but it definitely loses quality when it's uploaded, and I'm following all the general advise fb gives about photos that I've googled. I'm a litle surprised others haven't reported this same problem? If you have any other thoughts on this, it would be much appreciated...

I'm just not experiencing that. Your image looks fine in the screenshot, but it's small on my screen so I can't really tell. I would try running the ads regardless. Meanwhile, contact Facebook Ad support through the ad manager.

Hope that helps.

Sounds good Karen, thanks 🙂