How to Craft Effective Facebook Ads That Convert
Before we understand how to create really effective Facebook ads, we need to comprehend that Facebook ads can be quite effective – let’s begin with some statistics and examples that accentuate this.
According to research by Moz.com, the cost to reach 1,000 people with newspaper ads on an average is $32, the cost to reach 1,000 people with Google Adwords, about $2.74, and with Facebook ads, the same number is just about 25 cents.
The above statistics convey the judiciously priced Facebook ads. It costs your business only a dollar a day to put your content in front of 4,000 Facebook users. Another advantage that Facebook ads provide is that they are completely quantifiable. One can track Facebook ads for generating users’ interest clicks and conversions.
Facebook ads are relatively simple and amongst the most effective and inexpensive ways to increase brand awareness.
Types of Facebook Ads
There are fundamentally three types of Facebook ads: Sidebar, News Feed, and Mobile News Feed.
- Sidebar ads are the cheapest and on the downside also have the lowest average click-through-rate (CTR) as compared to the two other ad types
- News Feed ads are the most expensive and have the highest average click-through-rates.
- Mobile News Feed ads are specifically designed for mobile devices.
Pricing of Ads
The two most popular pricing structures for Facebook are pay-per-click (PPC or CPS) and pay-per-impression (PPM or CPM) - an impression being equivalent to 1,000 views of your ad.
The Reach of Your Facebook Ad
The total number of users who will see your Facebook ads depends primarily upon two factors: a) who your target audiences are and b) your total ad budget. Facebook allows you to see the "Potential Reach" of your advertisement i.e. the total number of people who can view your ads.
Facebook’s Ad Auction Feature
- Your Facebook ad goes into a Facebook ad auction and therefore marketers need to set their "Maximum Bid" within the Facebook ad builder.
- Within the ad auction, your ad competes against other ads that have the same target audience. How many of the target audience will view your ads on Facebook is entirely dependent upon your ad budget.
- If your target audience is not within the competitive market, the amount used to bid and reach enough of them will be lower.
- Irrespective of your bid amount, your Facebook ad will be visible to only a portion of the potential reach audience.
Tips to Make Your Facebook Ads More Effective
Effectively placed Facebook ads can be extremely beneficial for marketers. There are eight primary objectives that marketers wish to achieve through Facebook ads. Largely though out of those 8 website clicks and website conversion rates are often the end goal of most of the marketers:
- The website clicks allow marketers to drive Facebook traffic to their blogs, resources, or the lead generation landing pages.
- The website conversion rates are used to drive Facebook traffic to the blog and thereafter the behavior and action of the traffic can be tracked. One can, for example, figure out if their target audiences have subscribed to one's RSS feed. These results can be tracked if one has placed "Conversion Tracking Pixel" within their website.
Now let’s have a look at some of the tips to make Facebook ads more effective:
1. Properly Target your Facebook Ads
The targeting capabilities of Facebook ads are impeccable and this is what makes them worth all of your time and money. Targeting ensures that your ads will be seen by people who want to click on them i.e. people who are most likely to engage with your content.
There are three main types of targeting approaches for your Facebook ads that can be used independently or in conjunction with each other:
- Demographic Targeting
- Precise Targeting, and
- Broad Category Targeting
Generally, it is advisable to keep the potential reach of your ads between 10,000 to 50,000, depending on your budget.
2. Driving High-Quality Traffic With the Help of Facebook Ads
To target the Facebook ads to the right individuals, multiple strategies can be employed:
- Custom audience targeting
The “Custom Audience” box is visible at the top of the “Audience” window (just above the “Locations” box).
This functionality is used when one imports his existing contact database (RSS feed subscribers; clients or customers; newsletter subscribers; eBook subscribers, etc.) to Facebook's ad tool. Facebook then finds user profiles corresponding to the email addresses that one has provided and allows him to target an ad, just to those individuals.
This ad targeting method is excellent to increase your followers; however, not so useful to increase the readership of your content.
- Lookalike audience targeting
This targeting method makes use of an already imported custom audience. Facebook uses the custom audience defined to analyze the demographic and interest of the users and then selects the ones who best fit the profile. Then those users are grouped into the newly-defined "lookalike audience" group.
The lookalike audience created is similar to one's exiting readers and is made up of people who are somehow interested in the same things, might have the same job titles, have the same demographic characteristics, etc. Fundamentally, your lookalike audience is your ideal target audience – groups of readers who would value and love your content once they know it exists.
Following are some tips to make the best of the lookalike audience targeting functionality:
- Create a lookalike audience from your exiting blogs
- It is wise to make a tangential piece of content whether ebook, white paper, or case study available for free for a limited period of time. This content should be something that was previously available behind an email gate or other form of paywall
- Such pieces of content can be promoted using Facebook ads and targeted to your lookalike audience
- The Facebook ad should mention the exclusivity or the limited time availability of the piece of content that you’re promoting.
Once your content grabs the eyeballs of readers who're interested in the subject-matter, it enhances the reputation of your brand as a trusted source of information and does wonders for your omnichannel reputation management framework.
3. Using Facebook Ads to Generate Leads from Your Content
Lead generation is amongst the topmost goals of Facebook ads. Suppose you have created an ebook about real estate lead-gen that reflects on your company's marketing strategies.
Now suppose that your ad content is optimized and has a click-through-rate of 1.5%. If this campaign was run for a month, it would possibly be viewed by 225,000 users. If the ads convert at 1.5%, around 338 clicks can be generated through this lead-generating landing page.
Therefore, if the landing page is converting leads at a hypothetical rate of 25%, one can get 85 email addresses at a price of $7.50 per lead.
4. Retargeting the Users Who Abandoned
The “Real-Time” traffic in Google Analytics shows marketers the total number of people who’re currently on their blog.
Google can even provide you with the country of origin of the readers and the article that they’re currently looking at.
By sending over targeted messages to these users once they leave your site, you can possibly get the name and email address of those users.
This is completely possible with the help of retargeting ads. Facebook provides you with a pixel that can be placed within the code of your blog or anywhere else on your website. When a user comes to your website through any potential channel say search, advertising, syndicated content, or social links, he skims through your content and then possibly bounces off.
As they leave they trigger a pixel that has been placed within the code of your website. When this user returns to Facebook, the Facebook-oriented ad follows them and shows within their news feed – driving them back to your content or simply making them more aware of their business.
Retargeting can be used for lead generation in the following ways:
- The pixel provided can be placed on any page of the website, even on the lead-generating landing page
- If the site traffic to the page isn’t converting as desired, a retargeted ad can be used to set up to appear next time those visitors are logged into Facebook
- The ad can be optimized to drive users back to the landing page by offering some value to keep the users engaged.
According to the third-party retargeting provider Adroll, retargeted Facebook ads have 2,000 to 4,000 percent higher click-through rates than traditional Facebook ads.
Facebook ads promoting the content of a brand should always be used in conjunction with good content. The best results are fetched when the custom audience can be at least 10,000 strong in order to create a lookalike audience that gets you results. The percentage of similarity created for the lookalike audience should be A/B tested for different percentages and optimized.
Promote your marketing emails with the name of the eBooks in the subject matter; this optimizes the marketing emails sent to those leads.
Wrap Up
Your Facebook ads should be beautifully designed and must engage the audience with the use of bright colors in the newsfeed. The value of engagement should be included within the headline or body copy (Example – 10 Tips to Generate Leads for Your Business). Your ads should have a call-to-action (CTA) that tells people how to engage.
A/B testing your Facebook ads for different image types while keeping the headline and the body copy the same is also a good idea.
The above tips will guide you and give you a better idea of how to use Facebook ads to support your content strategy and optimize the Facebook ad conversions.