Sam Russell said
"Listen Now" : subscribers = £0.66

"Download": Subscribers = £0.82

 

I just found some button options by scrolling down that I hadn't seen before - thanks for pointing those out John. Testing a couple more buttons and seeing if I can bring that subscriber cost down a bit more!   

Hey Sam, sorry that I addressed my last post to Karen. Got my wires crossed. That's interesting. I have never had a winning campaign with Listen now. Download usually isn't my best performer either. But each ad and audience is different. Those are great prices.

Good luck on bringing down the prices even more. I know what you mean about scrolling... I missed those buttons for ages before I saw that they were there.

Karen Grace said
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I'm also doing a little experiment with a small audience that is really akin to my stuff (Laura Marling). I've already tested with her quite a lot and have just done 3 days of dynamic creative ads, and already the cheapest ad text is getting me subscribers at 92 cents which the first time I've got it to that dream price :). There are a few other audiences like this that I have a strong gut feeling will get me cheap subs, so I'm aware I could experiment with your idea of bringing them all together, doing an ad with my music video and creating a lookalike audience of people who watch it. But wanting to understand this better first. It would be great to understand why I would do this instead of just setting up lots of little audiences and cycling through them slowly with small budgets? I'm partly asking this as I've already done some testing with them so I feel like in a way I've already invested somewhat in getting data.

Congrats of getting under $1. That's a big win. The suggestion of creating lookalike audiences goes back to when you were having problems finding an audience. You don't necessarily need to do that at all. However, in the long run, having a lookalike audience in the mix will be of great value to you. However, the best lookalike audiences are made up of customer emails. But you'll need to wait until you get enough customers. If you are doing great the way you are, then there is no reason you can't skip lookalike audiences for now. Sometimes they work great, sometimes they flop miserably. The biggest reason lookalike audiences are worth developing is because they are huge. 2 million minimum in the US. And they can last you for years.

I'm also considering widening out my audiences beyond the usual US/UK/Australia Canada, to help broaden out the numbers. I know going worldwide is a bad idea, but looking at some of the artist's audience insights, I notice that Agnes Obel for example has lost of fans in Denmark and France. I'm wondering whether to test these audiences - I'm guessing that language barriers might be an issue - do you have any experience of testing countries that don't have English as their first language?

I have done some advertising in non English Speaking countries, but not a ton. It has never worked out for me. But there is no harm in trying if you can stomach the risk. But make sure you set things up so you can track the sales and see if these countries convert. Some countries will bring in subs, but not sales. I guess my thinking has always been that there is so much traffic out there in English speaking countries that it is best to target countries that stand the best chance at connecting with your copy, seeing as it's in English. But again, if you can stomach some risk, go for it.

Aside from all this, I'm wondering whether the above ideas are just more complicated than they need to be and I'm still hoping I'll find a big audience that works really well for me. Even Florence and the Machine hones down from 5 million to 130,000 after demographics are accounted for. And I'd rather find an audience where it works for both men and women, perhaps in addition to going with Florence women. Gonna try Bjork as I think I have some good ideas for ad text ...

Thank you.

Karen  

I do think you might be complicating it unnecessarily, but it's not crazy. Up to you, for the reasons stated above.

Re: Message in a bottle ads.... Sounds good. Let us know how they go.

Re: Instagram... yes, these days I start every DC campaign with all placements. Instagram has been performing better and better for me and I rarely turn it off anymore. That said, Facebook is still always the best performer for me. So yes, I would try going wider to test, especially with Instagram. You do not need a business account. I don't use one and don't really want to right now.

The placements that I usually end up turning off are things like market place, instant articles, and partners.

There is not much to stress over with the other platforms. Just give it a go and see how they perform. If you have something that is working, you could just clone the ad set, but only target Instagram. Just make sure you do it in a unique ad set within the same campaign. I would target everything in Instagram then look through your performance reports to see what did best.

It's really hard to say. Some of your audiences will last a few weeks, others might last a few months. So many variables. It won't be years. More likely a couple of months. But they will all peter out at different times. But often you can get more life out of them by just creating an identical campaign from scratch and running traffic to the same audience, because it resets FB's algorithm and gets you back into that tier 1 segment.