Facebook Advertising – did it work?
I wrote, a few weeks back, about an experiment using Facebook advertising to drive traffic to Fine Art America to see if I could sell a print of San Francisco:
I focused my advertising on people around San Francisco and set the budget at $30 spread over a week. Well, the results are in, and the total number of sales of prints on Fine Art America was zero! Sorry about making you click the read more link!
What did I learn – the promotion of my post reached 1507 people (I think that means that they saw it in their feed) and 144 engaged with the post in some way. 120 people liked the photo (including my normal readers). Of the promoted readers, 32 people clicked on the photo to see a larger view, 8 liked my Facebook page, 5 shared it with friends but just one clicked the link to go to the Fine Art America page! $30 for one link click does not seem to be a very profitable way to go forward! Perhaps my new posts will start to appear in front of some of these people without further promotion, and I have tried a post of the Golden Gate Bridge to see if that gets any reaction, but I think I will put down this exercise as a failure!
I’m still interested in any other tips you have on how to get more engagement with FineArtAmerica prints!
Hi, Steve
I understand your frustration with FAA, it is also mine. Your idea of FB advertising seems to me fair chosen.
In this case, if I may, I find the landscape at thumbnail and at click dimension too dark. I do prefer you image in color.
If this could help…
Cheers
Luisa F
It’s a nice experiment and $30 won’t break the bank. Didn’t work this time but perhaps with another print and another time it may work.
I think Facebook works best to promote products for your friends/family and their friends/family.
Hi Luisa
Its a fair comment. I do have the color version on FAA as well (it was in the previous post as a thumb). With the B&W version I was going for a moody look as I think people sometimes like these more “arty” images on their wall.
Steve
Hi Alexandre
Yes – the $30 is just noise, but I would have liked a few more clicks on the link. Of course, I could have worded the post differently, and maybe focused it differently (ie people who have traveled to San Francisco if that is possible). I think people sometimes buy prints to remind themselves of a vacation.
I might try again with one of my DC prints that seem to sell on FAA and see if I can get more sales of those.
Steve
As I said before it is *possible* that tweeter helps since I did sell two images through FAA that had received a lot of retweets. Now, this is just a loose correlation. It is possible (I don’t have a lot of information to substantiate this), that the number of views on an image on FAA is taken into account by the algorithm and that it might help your images to come up on top.
Hi Alessandra
I’ve tweeted one or two, but I’ve started posting things on LinkedIn which are getting a lot of views and some clicks through to FAA. My waterfall shot from Kauai was “seen” almost 4000 times in the LinkedIn feed, 48 people liked it and 13 clicked through to FAA. So that might help better than twitter as long as I don’t overuse it and get people tired of seeing my photos!