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I fail at Texas
Feb. 15th, 2016 11:45 pmFor my study, we’re running Facebook ads in the states with the highest smokeless tobacco use rates, trying to enroll wives of tobacco chewers, and we’ve been doing pretty well. I’ve been rotating our ads through the various regions, and every time I start up a new ad, we get lots of likes, shares, and taggings, with people referring their friends to the study. It’s great.
Last week, though, I ran up some numbers comparing the enrollment rate per smokeless user by state, and I found that we’re doing very poorly in Texas. That is, wives of chewers in Idaho and Wyoming, for example, are more than 40 times more likely to sign up for the study than wives of chewers in Texas.
So we thought, okay, let’s focus on Texas again for a few days. All of our ads include a photo of a happy couple, and JG found one that looked more “Texan,” so I put it into the ad and started running it. We got one person signing up on the first day, so I know the ad actually appeared, but… there were absolutely zero likes, shares, or tags. It was the same on the second day, and on the third I switched the photo to a different couple, in case we’d misjudged what looked Texan, but still no response. Or rather, we got thousands of clicks, until they’d used up our advertising budget, but nobody interacted with the ad. (We always get thousands of clicks, but some fraction of them are probably bots, and could even be Facebook-owned bots, for all we know.)
I then moved the ad to the West Coast and had seven likes within half an hour.
So, I fail at Texas. It’s kind of amusing, and also kind of fascinating, but I don’t think I want to throw more money at it.
Last week, though, I ran up some numbers comparing the enrollment rate per smokeless user by state, and I found that we’re doing very poorly in Texas. That is, wives of chewers in Idaho and Wyoming, for example, are more than 40 times more likely to sign up for the study than wives of chewers in Texas.
So we thought, okay, let’s focus on Texas again for a few days. All of our ads include a photo of a happy couple, and JG found one that looked more “Texan,” so I put it into the ad and started running it. We got one person signing up on the first day, so I know the ad actually appeared, but… there were absolutely zero likes, shares, or tags. It was the same on the second day, and on the third I switched the photo to a different couple, in case we’d misjudged what looked Texan, but still no response. Or rather, we got thousands of clicks, until they’d used up our advertising budget, but nobody interacted with the ad. (We always get thousands of clicks, but some fraction of them are probably bots, and could even be Facebook-owned bots, for all we know.)
I then moved the ad to the West Coast and had seven likes within half an hour.
So, I fail at Texas. It’s kind of amusing, and also kind of fascinating, but I don’t think I want to throw more money at it.