Despacito

If you spend $100 on Facebook Ads, you might be lucky if you get 10,000 impressions and 100 clicks. That is 1 dollar per click. If you are lucky. Those clicks might drive 100 visits to your website. Among those 100 visitors, again if you are lucky, you might get 1 sale. That is $100 per transaction (or CPA = $100). If you can sell your product at >$100 and make a reasonable profit, go ahead and spend as much as you can on Facebook. But, if you are not so lucky (your CPA is higher than your price), then spending on Facebook Ads doesn’t seem such a good idea… … unless you know how many times the video Despacito was shared on Facebook: 22,836,760 times. That is at least 22 million visits to this video… for FREE. If you have to spend on Facebook Ads to get that many visits, well you know, you would’ve to let go $22M. Nor wikipedia.org (925,998 shares) or twitter.com (7,012,842 shares) were shared that much on Facebook. Content triumphs over brand. If you optimize your Ad campaigns by CPA, it can work, if the numbers work. If they don’t, you would have to optimize by something more meaningful: giving your audience a reason to share your story. If you want to know how many times a link was shared on Facebook, you can use this python script I wrote. This is an example of the script’s output: