A short cautionary tale and learning from my own mistakes.
Facebook’s “Create an Offer” feature that includes the ability to add a discount code doesn’t link to your website in anyway, so don’t put a number for total offers available in when using it.
I don’t really see a use for this field in tandem with the discount code if there’s no way to validate code usage. If you’re running your ad against a $ budget, I don’t see why you’d ever limit by number of clicks or as Facebook terms it, “Total Offers Available” … but maybe I’m missing something.
It’s a great feature, and I was experimenting for future use in driving traffic to IT Arsenal, specifically for selling technical services, work, etc.
In this example I was driving traffic to the website maintenance and backup plans page with a %20 discount, including the monthly plan, which I think is a decent offer.
I thought I’d be able to connect my website or validate the offer was used in some way, but as it turned out, the first 10 people who clicked through to get my offer, were shown the coupon code and then my ad stopped.
Whoops.
Only one sale, which I guess I should be pretty happy about, 10% conversion isn’t bad, but I think I was just lucky.
After those 10 clicks, the ads stopped showing.
Luckily Facebook stopped charging me to show the ad as well, so it was cheap, the whole endeavor cost less than $20 to play with.
So what should I have done?
I should have used a discount code so the intended audience would still be enticed by the exclusivity, but validated the code on my site, not limited the total number offers available and when the codes “ran out” … offered a message redirecting to them to some other offer or to get in touch so a new relationship can still be formed and the potential sale not lost.
I would do this with Gravity Forms on my WordPress site of course, as this would all be plug and play using those tools.
Lesson learned, carry on!
If you have an experience like this, I’d love to hear about it so we can chuckle at it together.