Ninety-Eight Cents on Facebook

I spent ninety-eight cents on Facebook this past Sunday.

That’s less than a cup of coffee at the gas station. I want to tell you what it bought, because I think the answer is worth more than the money.

I set up a small paid test. A few dollars a day for four days, aimed at one thing only, getting people from Facebook over to the website to read. I didn’t want to throw a hundred dollars at it and hope. I wanted to see what the door looked like before I walked all the way through it.

Sunday was the first full day of counting. Forty-nine people saw the ad. It got shown fifty-two times, which means a few folks saw it twice. Facebook does that when it thinks someone might bite.

Seven of those people did something with it. They reacted, or commented, or just stopped their thumb long enough to touch it. Five of them clicked through. Five people left the feed and came over to read the work.

Now five doesn’t sound like much. If you heard five people showed up to a meeting, you’d figure the meeting was a bust. But that’s not the right way to measure it, and I want to show you why.

Five clicks out of fifty-two showings is close to one click in every ten. Most Facebook ads run around one click in a hundred. One in a hundred is normal. One in ten is not, and that’s the number that made me sit up in my chair.

The cost worked out to about twenty cents a click. Twenty cents to bring a person out of a loud, busy feed and onto a quiet page where they could sit with something worth their time. I’ll take that trade any day of the week.

There was one more thing that happened, and I’ll tell it straight. The same morning I set the ad up, before any money had moved, the regular posts on my page jumped. Not the paid one, the free ones. I didn’t do anything different except create the ad. Maybe setting up a paying account opened a door that had been held half shut. Maybe it was coincidence. One morning doesn’t make a rule, but I noticed it, and I’m watching for it again.

I’ll be honest about the size of all this, because that’s how this place runs. Fifty-two showings is a thin slice of pie. One more click or one fewer swings that one-in-ten number a good bit. So I’m not hanging a banner. I’m calling it a good first look, and nothing more yet.

Sunday is also a funny day to test anything. People move slower on Sunday. They scroll in their easy chairs after church or after the ballgame. They aren’t in a hurry, and they don’t click much. So if an ad holds up on a Sunday, the real question is what it does in a working week.

Monday through Friday is a different crowd. People are on their phones in the break room, in the parking lot, standing in line waiting on a sandwich. They’re busier and quicker to scroll past. If they stop for it the way the Sunday folks did, then I’ll know something real.

So I’m leaving it alone. I’m not changing the words, not changing who sees it, and not adding money. Every time you fiddle with an ad, Facebook starts learning all over again, and you lose your clean comparison. So it runs, and I watch, and I keep my hands in my pockets.

Two numbers matter to me this week. How much each click costs, and how many people click out of the ones who see it. The rest is mostly noise. How many people saw an ad only tells you how much money went out the door. It doesn’t tell you if anybody cared.

You might wonder why I’m telling you all this. Most folks who run ads don’t show their numbers. They post a big headline that says business is booming. They never tell you what it cost or how few people actually came. I don’t care to work that way, and I never have.

Everything I’ve written here for a long while has come back to one idea. Show your work. If a machine tells you something, you ought to be able to check it. If a man tells you something, the same rule applies. So here are my numbers, small as they are, out in the open where you can check me.

There’s another reason, and it’s for you. A lot of you are trying things on your own. A little business, a craft table, a church page, a blog that hasn’t found its readers yet. You’ve probably wondered whether a few dollars on an ad is worth it, or whether it’s just money down a hole.

I can’t answer that for you. But I can show you how to find out without losing your shirt. Start small. Pick one thing. Leave it alone long enough to learn something. Then look at what came back, and not the big flashy number. Look at the one that tells you a person cared enough to act.

That’s how you keep control of your own money. You don’t hand it to a system you don’t understand and hope it treats you fair. You test it. You watch it. You make it prove itself to you, a little at a time.

It’s the same way I’d tell you to handle AI. Don’t trust it because it sounds sure of itself. Trust it when it shows you why. Facebook’s ad system is a machine too. It makes choices every second about who sees what, and it doesn’t explain itself much. So I gave it a little rope to see what it would do. Ninety-eight cents of rope. So far it’s pulling in the right direction.

I’ll tell you how the week goes, good or bad. If the clicks dry up on Tuesday, you’ll hear it from me. If they hold, you’ll hear that too. That’s the deal. No dressing it up and no hiding the slow days, just the numbers and an old man reading them out loud so you can see how it’s done.

Five people came on Sunday. To those five, thank you. You didn’t have to click, and you did anyway. And to the rest of you reading this right now, you’re the next count.

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

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