EXPERIMENT: Lesson Unlocked (10 Views)

Hey, welcome back to my experiment! I served you a Facebook ad because you have viewed 10 or more pages of my website during the past 180 days.

Today’s video lesson is embedded below…

This has been a true “Experiment.” What I mean by that is that I had an original hypothesis and some goals for what I wanted to accomplish here, but I really didn’t know what would happen. You experiment to see what would happen! As a result, I’ve been making several adjustments on the fly as I learn new things.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned so far is related to frequency capping. As you know, I love using Reach optimization and frequency capping for ultra-hot, super-small audiences. I’ll often cap frequency at once per day or even twice per day, knowing that the audience is small (often a few hundred people) and the window may be short (seven days since they visited a certain page, for example).

However, those parameters don’t necessarily match up here, at least in all cases. The second lesson, which is targeted at people who viewed at least 3 pages of my website during the past 180 days, is a great example.

Facebook tells me that this audience includes between 13,500 and 14,200 people.

However, I have not been reaching anywhere close to that many people so far. By the third day of targeting this group (with two different ad sets), I had reached 4,567 people. Nine days later, and that had only increased to 6,024.

In other words, after the third day, I was mainly hitting the same people over and over again. That approach was fine for when I actually want to reach people often, but my goal here was to reach all of the people within an audience.

I’m using two different ad sets, one that goes to the US/UK/Canada/Australia and one that goes to everyone else. The first ad set had a frequency cap of once per day and the other was once every other day.

I decided to experiment with increasing that cap by one day each. The result: After the total people reached increased by only 1,500 (or so) people during the prior nine days, I reached an EXTRA (who hadn’t been reached before) 1,700 people on the first day I did this. That number increased by another 1,000 on the second day.

There is a balance here, of course. I worry about widening the frequency caps too far because the number of targetable people will shrink every time I do that. For example, let’s say there’s an audience of 1,000 people. We’re using a frequency cap of 1 every 7 days. We reach 700 people on the first day. That means we can’t reach those people again for six more days. Only 300 people will be eligible the next day, and that will keep shrinking.

That’s a concern because Facebook seems to have an invisible threshold to show your ads. If the audience is too small, delivery will simply stop. I absolutely want to push and find that threshold during this experiment. At some point, I expect to need to combine all countries again, once the audience gets too small.

One of the inspirations for sorting this out is a completely separate experiment that I’m running right now. I’m going to cover that in the next lesson!

If you want to get more tips served to you, you’ll need to first qualify! The next threshold to hit is viewing at least 11 pages of my website in 180 days.

View Prior Lessons

I have multiple engagement thresholds for viewing lessons in this experiment. If you were already ultra-active on my website, it’s possible you’ll skip a few of the initial lessons. As a result, I will link to all prior lessons at the bottom of each one.

Here you go: