EXPERIMENT: Lesson Unlocked (20 Views)

Hey, welcome back to my experiment! I served you a Facebook ad because you have viewed 20 or more pages of my website during the past 180 days.

Today’s video lesson is embedded below…

There are a couple of things that I find interesting that I wanted to discuss today related to small, engaged audiences: How Facebook distributes budget and the relationship to CTR.

Because we’re dealing with audiences that are around or under 1,000 people now (we’re at a point where Facebook won’t tell us the size of these audiences), I won’t reach my $30 daily budget on the remaining active ad sets. I’ve turned off everything up to the 15+ PageViews lesson once I reached a certain audience saturation.

Keep in mind that the remaining ad sets are all using a frequency cap of 1 in 3 days and Facebook has said that about 2/3 of all monthly Facebook users are on the platform on a given day.

The data logged here is the total reach for a given day for each audience (15+ PageViews in 180 days, for example), and the numbers along the top are the day of November when these results were reported. The first day, in most cases, is partial.

It’s interesting to see how the first full day is when I consistently reach the most people. A few people are not eligible due to frequency capping and reaching them during the partial day. But Facebook will reach as many people as they can otherwise.

Then, by the third day, the number drops off quite a bit as very few people are eligible to be reached. But you’ll notice that once we reach the fourth full day, we start recycling people we reached previously.

I also find the engagement rate by lesson interesting.

Not surprisingly, the second lesson has by far the lowest CTR. It also has by far the largest audience.

What explains the higher CTR for the first lesson (2+ PageViews over 30 days) compared to the fourth (5+ PageViews over 180 days), even though they are nearly the same size? I’d guess it’s due to recency.

While the CTRs aren’t tightly correlated the way CPM has been, take a look at those rates at the bottom! We’re over 5% now for the most recent lesson.

This, of course, makes sense. I’m only reaching those who have been most engaged with my website, so it’s only logical that these people would be most likely to engage.

Logical or not, it’s fun to see it play out in the numbers!

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 21 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: