advertising tutoring services through Facebook ads

March 7, 2018 9:37 AM

Does anyone have experience advertising their tutoring services by paying for Facebook ads? What was your experience like and was it cost effective in getting new students? Thanks!
posted by Gosha_Dog to Work & Money (2 answers total)

Not for tutoring, but I've used Facebook ads for other purposes. For a small business they are...very frustrating. You can never predict who you're going to reach or how many people. Your ads will run great for a couple days then just die for no apparent reason. Sometimes they come back. Very opaque, and very confusing. But at the same time they do get eyeballs and can generate results. They work...okay for me, and they might work better for tutoring .

One reason is that your business doesn't scale very much. There's only so many students you can tutor. If you suddenly have five hundred customers show up, you're kind of screwed. At the same time, the value of a single student to you over time is probably considerably more than the value of a single sale to me.

That's actually good for Facebook ads at the low end. You don't want to spend very much - I'd say no more than $10 a day, maybe less. You won't get huge reach, but then you couldn't use huge reach if you had it. A cheap ad will get you the kind of reach you can make use of, assuming you can convert people who show initial interest.

The trick is going to be targeting. Presumably you need to focused in on a pretty small geographic area. Then you need to find a lookalike audience that is interested in having their children tutored in your subject. That's going to be tough. It's a little outside my experience, but my gut tells me that won't align terribly well with Facebook's systems. But you'll have to explore that yourself.

One thing to keep in mind when designing your ads - do not put text on the image. Any text at all. Took me a while to figure that out. I don't know what your subject is, or how easy it will be to find relevant stock images, but just put the image up by itself and put your copy around it. Text on the image looks like an ad, and people's eyes slide right over it. Facebook doesn't serve it as often. You get a lower relevancy score (I can routinely get 10 relevancy now, which is as good as it gets, and lowers your cost per impression significantly) but when I was doing text on the images early on, I couldn't get above a six or seven.
posted by Naberius at 1:02 PM on March 7, 2018

Tried it. Didn’t work. People did not want to buy coaching from someone they encountered first on a Facebook ad. I can’t blame them...
posted by songs_about_rainbows at 1:58 PM on March 7, 2018