Facebook is the most used social network in the world today, according to Edison Research. And when it comes to how to optimize Facebook Ads, there are some best practices for attracting and engaging prospects, if you know what you're doing...
More than 70% of Facebook users log in daily and spend time on the platform.
About 93% of marketers already use Facebook advertising regularly leading to Facebook reporting a cool $7.68 billion in ad revenue in the first quarter of 2017.
With the average CPC (cost per click) of Facebook ads still at $1.72, it’s a gold mine waiting for you to dig in.
For businesses, it’s not surprising why Facebook advertising holds promise.
Here’s how you can make sure your Facebook ads work for your business:
Don’t Start Without A Sales Funnel
When getting started with learning how to optimize Facebook Ads, with or without a sales funnel, it's like picking up diamonds and throwing them into the Mariana Trench, one after the other -- just doesn’t make any sense, does it?
Your sales funnels are a guide path for your visitors to take action and to finally end up buying from you. Then, you’d want that buying action to repeat.
If you need help with funnels, be sure to attend our webinar to get access to our proven sales funnels formula for converting your cold audiences into hyperactive customers.
You can also grab these ROI-driven sales funnels from scratch for free. There’s also a complete video series for Sales Funnels if you’d rather opt for that.
Work With Audiences
Most advertisers and businesses don’t use the strongest asset they have when it comes to learning how to optimize Facebook Ads: data.
In a rush to launch ads and campaigns (and because patience is rare), most people do not spend enough time with Audience Insights to get to know more about your existing audiences. Nor do they set up conversion tracking and custom audiences the way that more seasoned advertisers and people looking to optimize Facebook ads do. One of the first things we do when getting into a client account, before spending a penny on ads, is set up audiences and conversion tracking to use the data that they do have and build on top of it...
Audience Insights: With Audience Insights, you’ll be able to determine the demographic profile, gender, location, interests, and more. While setting up the actual Facebook campaigns, you’ll be in a better position to test one audience against another, to choose the right locations, to pick the exact kind of an audience profile, and more.
Target Audiences: Armed with the information you get from audience insights and from other sources you have access to (such as Google Analytics), spend time by carefully choosing your exact target audiences you want to target while setting up the campaign. This part, right here, is the most time-consuming part of launching Facebook campaigns and it’s also the most important.
Custom & Lookalike Audiences: You should be collecting various custom audiences such as those who visit your website, your blog, or your eCommerce store. You can also start profiling your visitors based on the pages they visit. On top of these audiences, Facebook also provides you with lookalike audiences where Facebook creates a completely new audience by trying to match the profile of an already existing audience that you choose.
Creating all these audiences helps you with customer segmentation and allows you to send out tailor-made campaigns for better relevance and explosive results.
The Ads, The Copy, The Bells & Whistles
Facebook is all about visuals (images and graphics). Your ads along with the copy is a critical part of your campaign. Create ads with a singular offer, tailor-made for your audiences.
While the image itself should be able to communicate what the offer is, use descriptions and titles to further entice your audiences to take action.
As Sophia Bernazzani of Hubspot writes, winning ads are visual, enticing, and those with clear calls to action.
Facebook, however, gives you even more. In addition to the image ads, make use of the various ad formats available to you such as the canvas ad, carousel ads, vertical videos, 360 degrees video, slideshows, and collections.
Split test your campaigns
The images you use in your ads, the copy, the audiences, and the landing pages that your ads point to -- each of these can be a/b tested, and you should.
You can also test different combinations of split tests, as Rocco Alberto of Social Media Examiner explains.
While you should be testing only one element at a time, you can test all the elements (including landing pages) continuously, one after the other.
Ensure Tight Automation
Since you can’t possibly send out an email to every lead who signs up for your offer delivered through Facebook ads, There’s no point linking ads to landing pages or funnels for your Facebook advertising without some sort of marketing automation in place.
If you launch campaigns with branding, reach, and impressions as objectives, you’ll at least want to make sure that your Facebook pixel is set up and working. This helps you track and sort your active audiences (see above).
For more focused campaign types such as those with objectives of conversions, Facebook lead ads, etc., you’d want proper emails to go out to those leads as soon as they sign up. Those would be your marketing automation workflows.
Promising a free digital download or lead magnet on your ad? Your first email should thank your leads for signing up and then deliver the free download (also applies to free trials and coupons). You could also send welcome emails and other transactional emails (as the case may be).
If your campaigns are set up for a lead nurturing campaign with longer and more elaborate workflows, be sure to set up your marketing automation in that regard and create tight and impactful automation emails aligned with your goals.
Retargeting is not an option
Retargeting is the hottest thing that ever happened to advertising technology. But that’s not the only reason why you should consider using it mandatorily for your Facebook campaigns to work.
Since more than 80% of your visitors leave your website (or abandon shopping carts) without doing anything, your retargeting campaigns have a chance to get those same visitors back.
According to Giselle of Cmo.com, retargeting helps lift in search activity, boosts visibility, improve positivity towards your brand, and can boost ad response by 400%. Website visitors targeted with retargeting campaigns are 70% more likely to buy from you than otherwise.
Optimize your Campaigns. Continuously
Facebook ads are never “set it and forget it”.
If you think about it, Facebook ads are particularly hard to optimize and to ensure the longevity of your campaigns thanks to realities such as ad blindness and overexposure of your target audience to marketing messages and ads.
Add an ever-increasing complexity of consumer behavior and multiple touchpoints of an average purchase by a customer today, and you have it harder than ever.
As such, you’d want to optimize your ads to increase your click-through rates, lower your campaign costs, reach more audiences that provide you with higher ROI, and to lower your cost of acquisition.
Load up on all sorts of customization hacks or do it diligently with plain, data-driven decisions.
No matter how you choose to do it, optimizing your campaigns continuously helps you work towards the perfect lead generation or sales strategy for your business.
If you'd like us to take a look at your Facebook Ad Campaigns, marketing automation, and sales material; make sure to book an Action Plan call with us here... I bet we can point out at least a few things you're missing in the first 10 minutes we're on the phone :0)
Next Step
These new ad types are the key to starting or saving your Facebook campaigns. Rocking these things early on will launch you out of the gate fast and put a lot of audience data behind you. If you've got campaigns that are cooling off - then working some of these new ad formats may be the key to bring your supplement sales back in line.
Either way, if you need more sales, Facebook Ads are a great way to get them. And, we can help. Watch this short video and you'll see exactly what to do next!
Video Transcript:
What's up. This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to today's GSD daily. This is episode 60. We are going to talk about going through... We are going to optimize Facebook ads campaigns, so, or one optimize Facebook ads campaign in particular. So what today's kind of to-do, what we're going to be up to is we're optimizing a dynamic creative campaign inside Facebook, a couple of different videos, images, some different texts and headlines that we're going to go through and figure out how that... We're just going to kind of figure out what's bringing in conversions, and then we're going to talk to that a little bit.
So for those of you who don't know who I am, my name is Jason Drohn. I am the creator of doneforyou.com. We specialize in three things, building and creating offers, creating sales systems and sales funnels, and then also the marketing automation that drives it all. So today is kind of a piece of marketing automation, in that you need the traffic to turn the people who are coming to your website, or you need the traffic to get... To sell anything. So you can't have a website up and try to sell something and not get traffic, because, at the end of the day, a person is on the other side of the screen, that is who is pulling out a credit card and buying stuff from you.
So you always, always, always need to keep that in mind when you're building sales funnels, when you're doing email marketing, when you're building anything online, is that it is going to be read, and it's going to be read by another human being. So you have to write to them. You have to sell to them. You have to market to them. So it's kind of the idea. Now, right now, let's see. So the first is this... Today's episode is a kind of brought to you by this blog post. So this is a blog post that was written quite a while ago called, to optimize Facebook ads on the fly using their data. So it got me thinking about this topic for today's show. I was going back through some old stats and stuff.
The beautiful thing to optimize Facebook ads and the thing that a lot of people don't necessarily understand is that you're using Facebook's data to optimize your campaigns. So you are all the 2,000 data points that Facebook is attracting or Facebook is collecting on everybody, on you, on me, on everybody who has a Facebook account, all of the places they go, all the websites they visit, everything. Facebook is making that data available to you as an advertiser to help you opt-in, to help you build your audiences, to help you sell more, to help you market more effectively. After all, by letting you use that data and by allowing you to market more effectively, giving you the tools, then what it's doing is it's ensuring its future success because you're never going to use a different ad platform other than Facebook if you're finding success on Facebook.
So that's why they make the data available to you, and there's just so many different things that they collect that you can use as an advertiser. So you can... One of my favorite things to use in certain niches is life events. So somebody who is just got engaged, just got married, is having a baby, those are different life events that all trigger certain things, certain economic things that happen in the real world. So if somebody is having a baby, then chances are, they're probably looking for a new house. If they end a marriage, they're selling one house and buying two. There are all kinds of ways to interpret life events inside optimize Facebook ads data.
When you think about how an advertiser, how a marketer can use, or how a business can use these life events, then it makes a lot more sense to... From an advertising standpoint. So when you optimize Facebook ads, you want to, on the fly at least, you want to start... So you don't want to start with the sales funnel. the optimization or the ads themselves start with the audiences. They start with the people who make up those audiences. So the ads, the copy, the bells and whistles, all of that stuff is really important, having the right images, having the right video, having the right text and all that stuff, but you need to make sure you're targeting the right user, the right demographic, the right psychographic, the right type of person to get your ads working well.
Most importantly, though, is you need to split test your campaigns, so you can test different audiences. You can test in different images, different videos. There's a cool way to optimize Facebook ads made available not too long ago, well, kind of a long time ago, but in ad speak, it was six months or a year ago, but it's called dynamic creative. What dynamic creative is, is it allows you to split test different images, images, and videos with different headlines and different texts and different URLs, and then it does it all on the fly. So it does two things well. It lets you set up an ad once, and then it tests a bunch of different things for you. Then two, it also rotates things out so that as your ad is getting impressions, so it's going to show to the same person one, two, three, four, five times, and as it shows, it switches up little elements of the ad.
So it might switch up the image. It might switch up the text. But what it does is it gives a prospect a lot of different looks at your product and your business. There's kind of this rule taken on dating. So in this dating rule, like a pickup artists kind of dating stuff, but if you've ever done any work in the dating space, you're familiar with this, but basically in the dating space, there's this idea that if you meet someone and then you see them behind a bunch of different backgrounds. So like you're in front of the bar and then you're in front of the dance floor and then you're in front of the outside patio or whatever, then you feel, even though you might already know this, only know this person for like 20 minutes, you feel like you've known them for a long time because you've seen them in a lot of different contexts.
So dynamic creativity does the same thing to optimize Facebook ads. I mean, you see the same person, the same type of ad, the same brand in a lot of different contexts quickly. So it makes you feel like you know them better, which is a really powerful, powerful thing that a lot of people, I don't know that a lot of people would realize that that's happening, but one of the things we've done in testing dynamic creative, I've gone in and just whacked all the non-performing images. But then in whacking all of the non-performing images, the conversion drops, which doesn't make sense, but it only... Well, it makes sense only under the pretext that they had to see two videos or two images or whatever to get the full effect of the thing, the ad.
So they might see the ad and then tomorrow they come back and they see it, the same type of ad with different texts, the same type of ad, different image, and then it was only after they saw the second thing that they converted. So it's a kind of weird thing to think about. Then I've gone in and added some videos back in, and then all of a sudden conversions start to take off again. So it's not even... It's like they had to see the video first and then the image in the same campaign or you can split it on a retargeting campaign. So it gets all fucking weird. But it's one of those things you just got to think about like from a buyer standpoint, what are they doing? Do you know what I mean?
So you want to really... You want to ensure you have some nice tight automation. So somebody comes in, they sign up for a lead magnet. Then they go through a sales funnel and retargeting is not an option. I mean, we've talked a lot on this show about cold traffic and warm traffic. You need to make sure that you're bringing cold traffic into the mix, into your silos. So you have your feeder campaigns and they are coming down into your mix. Then once they are in your funnel, they're seeing retargeted ads to that warm audience, which kicked them out to be buyers or warm traffic. So that is, I mean, it's paramount to your success as cold and warm.
You want to optimize your campaigns. So, and the optimization is if you're spending a bunch of money, I mean if you're spending 100 bucks, 200 bucks a day, you can optimize pretty quickly. I mean, you can go through and split test a lot of stuff pretty quickly. $1,000, you can split test in an afternoon because you have that much traffic that is hitting your site. However, if you're spending $10 a day, it's going to take a week, week and a half to find any sort of meaningful data from the split test. So that's one of the things that is like we talked a little earlier in the week about optimizing through visual website optimizer. So you want to make sure to have that statistical significance. You want to make sure that you have enough visitors who hit that page to give that number merit. Usually, it's like 95% significance is what you're looking for. But 99% is better.
So what we're going to do is we're going to kick over to optimize Facebook ads campaign. I'm going to walk you through, this is an ad campaign we've talked about before. So if we go in, we're going to look at this lead magnet conversion. Now, just to kind of refresh your brain a little bit, let me throw off. So here we go. All right. So this campaign converts. So we're generating leads off of this campaign at about 55%, 52% to 55%. We've talked about this thing a couple of times in a couple of different contexts. The first was we've gone through and looked at this campaign. We've talked about some of the sales material behind this campaign. But what I want to talk about today is these dynamic ads.
So how this campaign is structured, this is a cold traffic campaign and then the cold traffic campaign is broken out into... So I broke them out into 10 year age groups for males, and then for females, it's a 30 year age group. So it's from 35 to 64. Then I've tested quite a bit back and forth. So basically this, we have our... This is 55 to 64, a desktop, male. Then we have 45 to 54 US male, and then we have 35 to 64 female. The ads are a little different. They have a little bit of different language in them. But if what we do is we break down this campaign, so these are dynamic, the top two are dynamic ads. So what we're going to do is we're going to back out to the last 30 days and we will see that, so this, all in all, we've got 964 leads through this campaign in the last 30 days. We've had 93 sales.
So it's a little bit less than the 10% conversion on the front end offer. We've tested. We've gotten quite a few leads, quite a few sales calls like that kind of thing, but all in all, we've spent $5,552 on this thing and we have generated about that on the front end sales. So if we look at, there's the data. Now, if we go in here and we break this campaign down by, so we're going to break this down, all right. So we're going to go into this one. Then we're going to break down by dynamic creative assets. So there are lots of different ways that we can segment this campaign out.
But basically, we can break it down by delivery. So we can look at the age and gender. This is all stuff that is super... I look at this stuff quite often. So we have 35 to 44, 45 to 50. Then so if there is something, some way that we can get these folks... So right now in this market, 45 to 54, we've got 26 sales from that segment. So it would make sense to... So if we continued scrolling over, let's see what our... So we have spent $700 in the 45 to 54 market. We've spent $700 to get, let's see, $700 to get 26 sales, which is awesome. Now, look at the other parts. So we've spent $638 in the 55 to 64 segment to get six sales. So that is not good. So obviously we need to disable 55 to 64 and 35 to 44.
We can re-enable them with some different ads. We can try something different. But this one is clear, obviously, this one right here is a clear winner and the other two are sucking, so they need to be disabled. So this is all part of optimization. As you can see, I haven't optimized this campaign. I was like, we might as well do it live together on this. Do you know what I mean? So, all right. So that's for the age group.
Now let's see. If we go down, so we can also look at the impression device. So let's look at platform and device and see if there's any kind of takeaways here. There might be. There might not be, I don't know. So it looks like we have eight conversions on Android Facebook, five on an iPhone, four on Android Instagram, and 14 on iPhone. Now let's go look at those numbers. Let's go look at the dollars. So we spent $234 to get 14 sales. So that might, I mean, like these where there are the outliers, we might be able to just show different ads on different segments and then scale from there. So this one, we've got eight sales on Facebook Android. Let's see what that number is. How much have we spent there? $600. So there might be something in there that we can kind of exploit. I don't know. That might be a little bit granular. But it might not be. We might be able to pull out.
So the big thing, the big thing I wanted to kind of get into in optimizing this for the dynamic creative is if we... Hold on, we're going to go here. Now let's look at dynamic creative image video. So the dynamic creative, how it's set up is you can put different images and different videos in, and then swap it, it rapid fires the different creative. So right now we have... Let's see. So in the last 30 days, I'm just going to go back to the last 14 days. All right. So in the last 14 days, we have had, so this is a video, video, video, video, video, image, video. So this is the one I was running for quite a while.
Then if we look at just the sales, so this image is still pulling higher than anything else. We've got four sales from this guy. So, which was just pretty good, right? So four sales from this image, and then we got three sales from this video, three sales from this video, two sales from this video, zero from this one, despite it having more results and more reach than most of the others. Then this one is just, hasn't been playing a whole lot. So it would be advantageous to pull probably this one out, because we're at $9.51 per lead, and then pull this one and this one out because they haven't sent any sales at all. So it would make sense to pull these out.
Now, if we look at, I don't know, so the website URL is the same regardless. The text, I think, I did switch up the text a little bit. So the winners in the text were this one, expanded to 274 pages, this sales system master guide. So that had six sales as compared to three, two, one and one. So we could pull out these bottom two and let the top ones just continue testing. I think that was all I had. I don't think I tested any different headlines or anything. Oh, no, I did, headlines. Yeah. So this one with the email, little email icon thing has four sales, three, three, and three. So there isn't necessarily like a clear winner there.
So, and then you just continue refining the ad campaign. Do you know what I mean? So you just kind of keep breaking everything down until you have... Oh, look at that. Don't get frozen out. So that one has seven sales. So all the low performing stuff, pull it out in this dynamic creative ad and then let it run a week and see how it is running in a week. Maybe we'll come back and show some optimization stuff after that.
Any questions? You guys have any questions at all? We went through and optimized a campaign, pretty fun stuff, right? So let's see. Does it work with images too? Yeah. So your dynamic creative campaign is going to work with images. So one of the things we do with quite a few folks is, especially the retargeted ad, we will upload the images, we'll upload four or five different images that we create on Canva. So Canva is a nice photo editor or image editor. You can log into Canva. It's where I create all kinds of stuff. I create even these GSD graphics that are created in Canva. It's a nice template-based. I mean, you can log in, you can search for a optimize Facebook ads, and then it'll show you a bunch of Facebook ads that are pretty looking.
Some of them pretty, some of them ugly. You don't want to go all pretty and all ugly. You kind of want to test a couple of different things. You have to keep your target market in mind. If you're advertising to females, think of the female design aesthetic. If you're advertising to male, think of male design aesthetic. Keep consistent colors and stuff with branding. So that's the important part. But overall, you can do that dynamic creative ad. You can set it up with images. You can set it up with a video. You can split-test different headlines.
The one thing that we have seen to work well is to use emojis. So if you type in Facebook emojis, so here, any of these, I think this one is the one that we normally use. Yeah. So these are copy and paste emojis, so basically if you want to paste in a smiley face, you just literally you highlight it, you hit copy, then you go and you paste it and it'll paste it into wherever you're going. So then that's how you set up the emojis for the ads. You can see just in this creative, this one right here doesn't get frozen out. We got seven sales from this. There was this one, we got one sale, we got four sales from the phone. [inaudible 00:20:58] not just leads. I mean, we got 69 leads from this don't get frozen out. Of those 69 leads, seven of them turned into sales. So it's just all in how you set up your analytics and your KPIs, which we talked about KPIs yesterday.
So yeah, if you have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com/start, fill out the application, and then we'll jump on a call together. We'll talk about your sales funnel, your traffic. We'll design something out for you. If there's anything else we can do, just let us know. All right, thanks. Bye.