Facebook Ads to Ron Paul Supporters

Free State Project Forum

264465 Posts in 21125 Topics by 34827 Members / Latest Member: ShellyWiggins

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?
May 21, 2013, 09:27:16 pm

Join the FSP

POSTING GUIDELINES and ADVICE FOR NEW MEMBERS

Here are the final results:

441,508 Impressions. 160 Clicks. 16 Connections. $0.11 CPM. $0.31 CPC.

The average Ron Paul supporter has to be a good person to aim to try to recruit to the Free State Project, but some of his supporters are more big government than he is, and they just don't like the other choices (for instance, blue republicans that want pot legalized and the wars to end but don't necessarily want to end the welfare state or nanny-laws).

How about targeting the hardcore Ron Paul supporters on Facebook if that is at all possible.

For instance, people who belong to or LIKE the groups: "Thomas E. Woods Jr.", "I bet Ludwig von Mises can get more fans than John Maynard Keynes", "Ludwig von Mises Institute", "Mises Academy", more local groups where the supporters plan events more like "Porter County for Ron Paul" (it's small, but the people in it seem to care about the election more), "Ron Paul Flix", "Libertarian Party", and "Libertarian Party of Indiana".

just some ideas of places that may contain more passionate supporters of liberty than one giant facebook group about Ron Paul that has hundreds of thousands of people in it, half of whom might not really care that much.

Quote from: powerline87 on March 13, 2012, 02:27:32 am

I forgot to mention another good group to look at for recruits: "Revolution PAC"

I recently ran some Facebook ads based primarily on the info in this thread (thank you LoveAndPeace for posting all the details so we can easily build on what's been done previously).

Summary of my results:

Spent $98.46
Campaign reached 68,274 individuals at 6.0x average frequency
201 clicks at average of $0.49 cost per click (CPC)
0.049% click-through-ratio (CTR)
One FSP signup*

*My goal was to track how many signups were created in order to gauge the cost effectiveness. The only caveat is that I use Google Analytics to track this, and it's not currently set up to distinguish between Friend and Participant signups, so there is a bit of a fudge factor.

So, ~$100 spent and one signup. This is not statistically significant but, having tracked past FSP Facebook campaigns and having a fairly good sense of how well the FSP site converts visitors overall, I think it's in the ballpark. So, I'd say it works, but not particularly cost effective. Two things I think could be improved to make it more effective:

I think the biggest opportunity is that the FSP website redesign will make the signup process much easier, which could lead to a big increase in the percentage of website visitors that complete the signup process. I am not currently involved in the redesign process, but ideally we'll end up with a much clearer and simpler process that starts by grabbing all their contact info, gets them to commit to being a participant, and then as a last step makes them jump through the hoops for website registration (so that if they abandon the process we have their info and can follow up and get them to finish).
Better ad management (bidding and targeting): if I'd been a bit more careful as far as bidding/targeting, I probably could have brought the average CPC (cost per click) down to $0.30-$0.40 as opposed to $0.49. Also can do some work to determine which states and other demographics are most cost effective.

My recommendation is that once the redesigned freestateproject.org site is launched, we revisit and perhaps the official FSP org will be able to commit a few hundred dollars for another "pilot" and see what kind of results we can get. In the meantime, I recommend anyone who can obtain a free $50 Facebook credit and wants to help out, follow the instructions in original post.

other notes:
Mostly the ads I ran were based closely on the strategy described in the original post: I used the "Want More Liberty?" ad and targeted Ron Paul supporters. As an experiment, I tried a couple other variations. One was the same text but I used a photo of Ron Paul (at Liberty Forum) instead of the FSP logo. The other was a different ad targeted at Lew Rockwell users. Those ads appeared to result in lower quality traffic (although the data is preliminary and there may have been other factors). Here are the Facebook ad stats and Google Analytics stats for anyone interested. One other note, these were all CPC ads, I did try spending a few bucks on CPM (not included in these stats) and quickly decided it did not seem to be worthwhile for this purpose.

I'll do a run if you can tell me where to get one of those $50 coupons! (the links I tried were broke)

Quote from: dumbthumbs on November 23, 2012, 11:19:34 pm

I'll do a run if you can tell me where to get one of those $50 coupons! (the links I tried were broke)

Thanks for your interest! Unfortunately, it does not appear Facebook is currently giving out free advertising coupons.

NOTICE: The forum will be down for maintenance beginning at 7PM (NH time) this evening. It should be up again by 9PM. Please forgive the inconvenience and feel free to e-mail arick@freestateproject.org if you have any questions or support requests.