We're still super early into this brave new world of iPhone application development, but we figured we might as well kick off a bit of advertising in hopes of raising awareness for the website in order to build some hype.
I started working on this campaign this afternoon and chose Facebook to be our initial provider. I went with their service for several reasons. First, it allows us to be frugal (our first campaign is just a test for a couple bucks). Second, it allows us to target extremely well. Third, it's very flexible with its ad formatting.
We needed to be extremely cheap with this run, because we don't have any income coming in as of right now. Our goal is to be as cheap as possible with the development of this application and Facebook is allowing us to do that with our advertising. Other ad services often require you to make a minimum purchase per day that is well beyond our budget. Not Facebook and thus they get our money.
Targeting was a very big need for us in this test market and another reason as to why Facebook got our money. For this campaign, we're focusing primarily on our website and not any specific app ourself. Because we're advertising the website, we wanted to hit people who would be interested in iPhone application development and not the general population. Facebook really allowed us to do this quite well as you can see here.
Through our use of Google Analytics, we know exactly where our inital hits on our website are coming from. This helps us test run the success of our first advertising run by targeting cities we haven't seen large amounts of web traffic from yet. Having city data available gives us a baseline, much like you would have in any high school science class. Cities where we haven't seen much traffic so far are our control groups and the 13 metro areas selected in our campaign are our experimental groups. Based on the changes in traffic over our test period, we'll be able to judge just how much traffic we are receiving for our money.
We were also able to place specifics on a couple other variables upon which will help determine who will see our ads over the test period. We targeted people in between the ages of 18 and 32 mostly because we feel that is a target iPhone user group. We chose men (sorry ladies) because from the data we could find, it seems as if men are more into developing iPhone applications than women and thus our money would be spent best there. You can see through our keywords that we've selected terms that will hopefully target our ad to a specific audience we feel will best enjoy our site. We've also chosen single men for this test run, mostly because we're not sure that many guys with girlfriends are interested in spending a bunch of time in learning how to program for the iPhone (even though Mike is engaged while Jeff and I both currently have girlfriends? I guess we're hypocrites haha).
Facebook also gave us a lot of flexibility and help in designing the ad. We had to meet character limits, but other then that the whole process was fairly simple. I didn't want to put a whole lot of time into developing a full scale ad campaign for something we're just using as a quick test for the future. Here's a mock up of what will go live.
The ad campaign should be starting on Facebook tomorrow, so if you fall within our target market, be sure to keep an eye out and send us a screen shot if you see it out in the wild. We'll hopefully be able to give you some sort of update into the success of the campaign in the near future.
I started working on this campaign this afternoon and chose Facebook to be our initial provider. I went with their service for several reasons. First, it allows us to be frugal (our first campaign is just a test for a couple bucks). Second, it allows us to target extremely well. Third, it's very flexible with its ad formatting.
We needed to be extremely cheap with this run, because we don't have any income coming in as of right now. Our goal is to be as cheap as possible with the development of this application and Facebook is allowing us to do that with our advertising. Other ad services often require you to make a minimum purchase per day that is well beyond our budget. Not Facebook and thus they get our money.
Targeting was a very big need for us in this test market and another reason as to why Facebook got our money. For this campaign, we're focusing primarily on our website and not any specific app ourself. Because we're advertising the website, we wanted to hit people who would be interested in iPhone application development and not the general population. Facebook really allowed us to do this quite well as you can see here.
Through our use of Google Analytics, we know exactly where our inital hits on our website are coming from. This helps us test run the success of our first advertising run by targeting cities we haven't seen large amounts of web traffic from yet. Having city data available gives us a baseline, much like you would have in any high school science class. Cities where we haven't seen much traffic so far are our control groups and the 13 metro areas selected in our campaign are our experimental groups. Based on the changes in traffic over our test period, we'll be able to judge just how much traffic we are receiving for our money.We were also able to place specifics on a couple other variables upon which will help determine who will see our ads over the test period. We targeted people in between the ages of 18 and 32 mostly because we feel that is a target iPhone user group. We chose men (sorry ladies) because from the data we could find, it seems as if men are more into developing iPhone applications than women and thus our money would be spent best there. You can see through our keywords that we've selected terms that will hopefully target our ad to a specific audience we feel will best enjoy our site. We've also chosen single men for this test run, mostly because we're not sure that many guys with girlfriends are interested in spending a bunch of time in learning how to program for the iPhone (even though Mike is engaged while Jeff and I both currently have girlfriends? I guess we're hypocrites haha).
Facebook also gave us a lot of flexibility and help in designing the ad. We had to meet character limits, but other then that the whole process was fairly simple. I didn't want to put a whole lot of time into developing a full scale ad campaign for something we're just using as a quick test for the future. Here's a mock up of what will go live.
The ad campaign should be starting on Facebook tomorrow, so if you fall within our target market, be sure to keep an eye out and send us a screen shot if you see it out in the wild. We'll hopefully be able to give you some sort of update into the success of the campaign in the near future.