Advertising for the Wedding Photographer Part 2b
Advertising with the Hitched.co.uk Wedding Directory
Advertising for the Wedding Photographer Part 3
Google Adwords and Bipolar Facebook advertising
Chapter 1: Wedding Magazines and Print Advertising
Chapter 2: Directories, Google and Facebook cold calls
Chapter 2b: The Hitched Directory
Chapter 3: Google Adwords and Bipolar Facebook advertising (You are here)
Chapter 4: Social Media
Chapter 5: Wedding Blogs
Chapter 6: Facebook Groups and Wedding Forums
Chapter 7: Wedding Fairs and Bridal Shows
Chapter 8: What works for me
Advertising using Adwords and Facebook
Over 4 Grand.
That’s a lot of money. If you were buying Mars Bars in multipacks that would be 16,000 mars bars. Which is 3 million, 920 thousand calories. For an average male that’s enough energy to last him 1568 days, which is 4 years and 108 days.
That’s how much I spent on Adwords.
When I first started out and nobody knew who I was in relation to photography. Google Adwords was a golden ticket to exposure. Admittedly my work wasn’t at the standard it is today but I was charging between £400-800 per wedding. A far cry from the £1450 starting price I’m at now.
What work that I had though was still very good for the price point and yes, I got work from Adwords.
But boy oh boy was it expensive. Tax deductable, but still.
You can target keywords with Google Adwords and to some extent the audience yet, at approvimately £1.50 per click it’s a crazy amount to pay when it could be someone who might not have the budget for my services, might not like my work and might be getting married on a date I’m already booked for.
It’s also quite complicated to use PROPERLY. I’ve not used Adwords for a couple of years now. I’ve not really felt the need but it was exceptionally hit and miss.
I was constantly fighting a bidding war between other advertisers in the same niche. Paying £1.50 per click is a lot of money to essentially hand out your business card to someone. The misses were more prominent than the hits and in the end the total take from all the bookings only just covered the Adwords spend.
I had a campaign running for 3 months and didn’t have a single enquiry from it. Then in one month, 2 bookings. You just don’t know what’s going on and it feels a complete gamble.
You can also get window shopped by the competition costing you a click fee for grazers to look at your work. (btw, this is a crappy thing to do, don’t cost your neighbour unnecessary fees).
As I’ve said, this was a couple of years ago. Competition from other advertising sources may of driven prices down and I know of several people who successfully run campaigns and make a profit. My advice, get good advice. A fool and their money are easily parted.
The hysterically unpredictable revenue stream that is Facebook advertising.
Ok so I’ll admit this. I hate Facebook ads because they’re always all over the place.
It feels like that sometimes
I had a campaign running last year with Facebook. Right hand column, pay by impressions. Got LOTS of impressions. I could target people in a certain area very accurately and I could target couples who are engaged.
I spent about £250 and it wasn’t until I got to week 10 of nothing that I decided to quit fb ads and call them a useless piece of junk.
Then a week later, no ads running I get a booking. Crazy. That wedding led to a further 2 bookings! Yay!
So I ran the ads for another 6 weeks before I called it a day and considered it a blip.
I really like the way you can target interests and detailed demographics on Facebook, but there’s a catch. People lie about themselves.
Roll forward to this year and Facebook have started to use Timeline ads. These are in your face, ‘you can’t ignore them really’ ads. This is an important thing to note as the right hand column you’ve no reason to look at. All the personal stuff, cat beards and babies that look like Winston Churchill is center column.
So a smart move by those at Facebook.
Now this is where it gets real interesting.
In the ad manager of Facebook you can create an ad set for clicks to your website or to your fb fan / business page for likes. Then when you create the ad you can target either the centre news feed, right coloumn or both.
The weird thing is that after an ad starts up and runs, in about two weeks it falls over and dies.
Kill the ad, start again and it goes crazy again. Loads of clicks for a couple of weeks then it shrivels up and dies. A bit like the ‘are you sure he’s dead’ bad guy in the Friday 13th Horror movies
I always aimed to promote my site. Initially it was a case of 9-15p per click to my site (I was paying per 1000 impressions) yet a few weeks later, same campaign, same target and no clicks to my site, all went to my fb page.
An unrelated still from the Goonies to keep the Movie Memes going.
Hence why I call fb ads bipolar. They’re in a state of flux.
How one ad can get a huge amount of site click throughs, but the same ad the next week receives fb fan page clicks instead is beyond my understanding and says the ads are whack and unpredictable.
I did get a booking from the Timeline ads. However this was from my first campaign. Nothing from my subsequent ones with the same ad and reach. The images you choose make a lot of difference too in the cost per click.Below are the images used and the relative cost per click.
38p per click
70p per click
53p per click
14p per click
65p per click
45p per click
81p per click
47p per click
56p per click
68p per click
So the star performer was the T-Rex. But then is the high click rate offset because of the ‘Urmagurd a T-Rex’ effect?
Facebook’s audience figures are a bit whack too. Target London and users within a 50 kilometre radius who are engaged and between 24 and 40 is about 240,000 people.
There isn’t 240,000 people. There’s loads of old unused accounts, sock accounts for spying on ex’s and other stuff. After a two week campaign my ad had been viewed on average 3 times per person yet had only been shown 22,000 times. I’m sure some of that target audience were actually 14 year olds engaged to their best friend or something equally crazy like that.
So in summary, Google and Facebook do work. Is it worth it though, not sure. Success could be strongly related to the price you charge.
Comments are open. Tell us how your social media advertising went.
Next: Social media for the Photographer.
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Great post. Interesting point about the 2 week ad lifespan. I think it’s worth mentioning as well that there is different types of ads that you can do. You can have straightforward ads where targeting is much more specific or you boost posts where it’s a lot less easily targetable. Depending on the content of the post that you are boosting though and depending on the results you are looking for, boosting posts can sometimes even be more successful than straight ads. I’ve certainly had very different results with both types – both positive in different ways. It’s important to note though that you can only boost a post so many times (3 I think) and then you have to post the post from scratch if you want to boost it again, which can be frustrating.
Thanks for this post Chris. There is something comforting about reading it! To me, social media advertising will always be faddy, in the same way that social media is faddy… As such one can sink a lot of money into advertising on facebook etc.
Interesting article Chris.
It’s also worth noting that a browser plugin such as AdBlock Plus will kill all Facebook ads – I never see any FB ads in my timeline – in fact I wasn’t even aware they existed until I visited Facebook in the Safari browser on my iPad. 🙂
Ugh. Now you’ve made me go back and actually look at the numbers for Facebook advertising this year. Yes I did get bookings, but at a very high cost.
I think Facebook might be a seasonal thing. $5000 worth of wedding bookings at the cost of $2500 over the year.
The drag is that the inquiries tend to be low-budget brides. So while I feel like I’m getting some ‘action’, they don’t turn into sales.
I think this year I’m going to go full tilt through January and then turn them off for awhile.
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