Is using Facebook advertising's "buyers" target a good way to lure likely shoppers?

Question

I need to advertise a website to sell products related to Saint Seiya, so I decided to begin with Facebook (as Google Adwords seems to be a bit too advanced for me at the moment), and I started creating my ad.

I created a campaign for clicks on website, as my products are on an external website which I don't manage, so I can't install a facebook pixel to track conversions.

I chose my Audience with these criteria:

• People aged 18-35
• American people (I selected North, Center and South America)
• Buyers (Under Behaviors -> Purchase habits) AND
  • Interested in -> Saint Seiya

This resulted in an audience of about 800k people.

Now, I set the campaign to last 5 days with a 100$ budget (20$/day), it's on since a couple days, I spent nearly 40$ but I had exactly 0 sales.

I'm pretty sure the products are ok, they have been bought before and customers were happy.

Am I missing something? Shouldn't the "buyers" filter help me reach those who are likely to buy something instead of just watching the ad? Is there anything wrong with how I chose my target audience? If so, how could I improve it?

Answer 1

There are two options:

1. You make a better targeting to people who have buying intention.
2. You make a better sales site which converts better.

Also you could read into facebooks custom audiences feature for ads, there is a lot of fun stuff you can do with that ;-)

Answer 2

$40 is a low enough budget that you don't have a large enough sample size. It can be fairly normal for companies to have customer acquisition costs of $20-$100. Depending on how competitive and lucrative your field, it can be even higher. As a result, you may expect only 1-2 customers from your $40 marketing investment. And due to probabilities, it's quite possible to land 0 customers in a $40 experiment.

Despite being a small sample size from your investment, it may be that your ad campaign doesn't work and that you do need to decide how to target differently. But it's a bit soon to say for sure.