Part 1: Learning how your application behaves using cheap Facebook ads

The next three posts are all tied together.

top3Clicks was created with a two part vision:
1. Help a person find items to purchase based on their interests.
2. Use that persons expertise to educate and entice friends to find items to purchase.

When we set out to create an application with Facebook, we had a hunch that a users profile interests would be a 'killer' starting point to then recommend items for potential purchase. We focused on making it real simple to use and allowing users to opt into telling their friends about their items of interest.

As expected, we built the application, went live and told all our closest and dearest friends to give it a whirl. From all their wonderful feedback, we fine tuned the experience adding features to make better suggestions, added a Getting Started page, etc. (check the archives) We really have appreciated all the friend QA efforts.

But I have to tell ya, there is nothing like random users to help understand how your application is really performing.

To find random users, we decided to use Facebook ads. As we ran each ad campaign, we started to learn a great deal about our user experience.

Here is the path we took and what we learned:

1. A big congratulations to the World Champion Philadelphia Phillies! (Bacon grew up in Philly and hadn't seen a championship since 1983)

With the victory, we started placing CPC ads to just see if we could get users to top3Clicks and purchase Phillies gear.

Our expectations: We didn't expect a lot of clicks and we were really pumped to see users click on the ad.

We learned: We sent users to the about page for top3Clicks. This gave users a chance to add the application but didn't give the user the thrill of seeing Phillie recommendations. We needed to send users directly to the recommendations.


2. Another big congratulations is in order for president-elect Barack Obama!

With election day a couple days away, we decided to test to see if we could entice users with Obama gear and send the user directly to the recommendation screen.

Our expectations: We knew people would click on ads so we were focused on whether users would purchase items. To our surprise, many users clicked on the ad and went to the site and ordered!

We learned: If we send users directly to our recommendation page (skipping the about page) with a compelling item then a percentage of users will order. The bad news was that not a lot of user that clicked on the ad actually 'Allow' authorization to add the top3Clicks application. So we focused on trying to get that number up.


3. Bacon is also a big Howard Stern fan and knew Artie Lange (his sidekick) was about to launch his new book. So we targeted New York Facebook users with the following ad -->

Our expectations: We wanted to get a bigger percentage of users that click on the ad to actually authorize top3Clicks application. Authorized users allows us to use the users profile for recommendations and to notify friends of interesting items.

We added an auto-authorization feature to send users directly to the recommendation screen to see items and potentially order and added tracking IDs for every action on our site.

We learned: Artie delivered a significant amount of users to the site but we did not see any increase in orders or authorizations. This was disappointing but started the brainstorming process that lead what we'll be talking about in the next 'part 2' post.

4. Marathon is a big The Office fan. We targeted people who like 30 Rock, Comedy Central, The Office and Steve Carell with the
following ad. -->

Our expectations: We focused on creating an 'automagical' flow where a user clicks on an ad then sends a notification to their friends to get their friends to try the service.

We learned: When users clicked to our site and looked at recommendations, we also sent notifications to their friends. We were able to see friends of the original user also sign up for Artie Lange on top3Clicks. (FOAF)


Conclusion: With Facebook Ads, we learned in an affordable, iterative way that we can add features to top3Clicks to achieve viral usage and orders. We're now focused on how to get users to keep coming back. We have successfully had random users start a 'loop of usage'.