The Idea

This case study focuses on the NBA Finals that recently ended with Miami Heats beating the Oklahoma Thundercats.

Now truthfully, I don’t know the slightest thing about the NBA, or even basketball, but after reading a recent case study example, I was inspired to give it a try. I only managed to jump into this campaign at the last 7 matches between OKC and MIA, but still, this was certainly a learning experience.

So here goes.

Purpose

To monetize the NBA Playoffs/Finals using Facebook ads.

Ad Targeting

I created an ad on Facebook with the following details:

Destination/URL: A BevoMedia offer-rotator (more on that shortly). What is BevoMedia? It’s a statistical tracking platform for affiliate marketing.

The ad details as noted below.

The ad keywords were adjusted accordingly to Oklahoma as well (ie. Within 50km of Oklahoma city). This allows us to laser-target our niche and location.

Ad-Copy Images

Furthermore, I ran several ad-copy images for testing. Here are the statistics for the campaign.

	Impressions: 97,251Clicks: 13CTR: 0.013%
	Impressions: 264,404Clicks: 50CTR: 0.019%
	Impressions: 5026Clicks: 2CTR: 0.010%
	Impressions: 3334Clicks: 0CTR: 0.0%
	Impressions: 6643           Clicks: 16CTR: 0.032%Winner
	Impressions: 5881Clicks: 2CTR: 0.007%

As you can see, the 5th ad had the highest CTR at 0.032%, which is still fairly unimpressive, but acceptable.

Border vs. No Border

This case study focuses on the style of border. In effect, a thick border had the highest CTR, compared to other styles/no-border.

Also, every ad had a red border around thanks to another case studies I’ve read that indicate an increased CTR within Facebooks primarily blue theme.

Landing Page

Next, once the user clicked on the ad, they would be sent to this particular landing page (the teams are interchangeable).

Offers

Once the user voted for their team, they would be redirected to 5 different offers, all NBA related:

Max Bounty: Free Jersey – $2.25/Lead

Max Bounty: Free $250 NBA Store Gift Card – $2.40/Lead

Peerfly: Free Jersey – $1.40/Lead

Peerfly: Free Jersey – $2.00/Lead

MundoMedia: Free Jersey – $1.40/Lead

All of these offers were simple 1 or 2 page submits of email or zip or whatever, and all targeted to the U.S.

Bidding Strategy (CPM vs. CPC)

I decided to use a CPM strategy to minimize the cost of clicks. According to this case study of CPM vs. CPC, the CPM was more cost effective per click, despite the lower statistical CTR.

I was paying $ 0.04-0.08 per 1000 impressions (CPM).

Results

Clicks: 83

Conversions: 2

Revenue: $4.40

Expense: $34.27 (subtracted from a Facebook Ad Credit)

Profit: -$29.87

This campaign was not profitable, but it was a definite learning experience. One thing to really note is Facebook’s incredibly low CTR for ads. This means users are increasingly becoming ad-blind on Facebook ads, thus ad-expenditure will increase.

Also, the landing page was perhaps not as optimized as it should have been. But moving forward, we will create more campaigns, with items of higher commission.

Hope you learned something from this campaign.

Cheers.

P.S. I would like to thank TruePassiveLiving.com for this campaign idea.

Quote for your monkey:

“What makes content engaging is relevancy. You need to connect the contact information with the content information.”

~ Gail Goodman, President & CEO, Constant Contact

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Leonidas K.

Digital Brand Spartan

Leonidas is an incredible Web Developer, amazing Digital Marketer, and outstanding Brand Ambassador. He is the author of various exciting case studies in digital marketing. Make sure to read them to make your life so much better!

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