How to Get More from Your Facebook Ads

Social Media / July 22nd 2019

I speak to a lot of businesses that have ‘tried’ Facebook advertising but don’t do it anymore. When asked why? The answer is ‘it didn’t work’.

More often than not, though. It should have worked. Facebook Ads are an excellent and underpriced way of reaching extremely specific audiences. In almost every case – when done properly, a campaign will deliver ROI. The same applies to Instagram too.

In this article, we’ll look at ways to make sure you’re getting the most from your Facebook Ads. Going through everything from campaign set-up and creative to landing page optimisation. Here goes…

Audience Targeting

Specificity is what makes Facebook such a powerful advertising platform. Too many advertisers (business owners) narrow their audience down to just one filter (age group) – some don’t narrow the audience down at all!

Their argument being that more eyeballs = better. But, it doesn’t.

If that’s your belief and the route you want to take, then you should be using display advertising (or a billboard or bus advert).

I can’t stress enough how important it is to have detailed customer personas. In general, it’s going to serve your entire marketing strategy well. But, for Facebook Ads it’s vital. Ideally, have a few. You can then create different creatives and (if applicable) landing pages specifically for that person. You’ll be amazed at what this does to your conversion rates.

Your job is then to try and create that exact persona in the ‘audince builder’ when building a campaign. Begin by thinking about age, gender, interests, location – they’re a good start.

There’s much more though.

Target potential customers based on life events – have they recently had an anniversary, does their best friend have a birthday coming up? Online behaviour – what websites do they visit? Which CTA’s do they usually click on? Even their lifestyle – how much do they earn? How often do they travel? What sort of events do they attend? What time of day are they most often online? Etc.

Best of all, Facebook makes this kind of tailoring relatively easy. This means you can make the Ad as relevant to the consumer as possible. Imagine how powerful that is.

It’s hard to go too far when building an audience persona/bio. The best examples I’ve seen even use made-up names and borrowed images to make the pretend customer seem more real. These aren’t factors you could (or would) target but it makes the persona more realistic, memorable and easy to build user experience for.

Remember, getting 1,000 random people to see an ad about a golf resort is not going to be as successful as getting views from 50 avid golf enthusiasts, that travel regularly, with an upcoming birthday. So get narrowing your audience if you want success.

Get the Creative Right

This could easily be a blog post in itself because quite a lot of people get this wrong.

The first thing to understand here is that people don’t care. It sounds harsh but it’s true. Users are not on facebook to read about your FaBs. They’re not mindlessly scrolling past their friend’s embarrassing night out pics to get to your ad about why your product and service is so great.

Your ad is competing with content that is (probably) of great interest to the user. Content from and about people they love, care about, find amusing and in some cases greatly dislike. This is some strong competition.

It highlights the importance of the point above (making sure your audience is relevant). But, should also demonstrate the importance of your need to stand out. This can be done one of two ways and the smarter marketers amongst you will utilise a combination of both – for serious results.

The first is to utilise eye–catching design. Bright colours, amazing imagery, bold and concise messaging. Give users a reason to stop scrolling and look at the image you’re using in your ad. That’s your first mission: Stop them scrolling. If you’ve honed your audience enough, you’re halfway there at this point.

The second (and most important) is to offer value to the user. It’s worth repeating – users don’t care about why your product is the best or how it’s more efficient. What’s in it for them?

Can you give something away? Offer more than your competitors and show this in a clear and concise way.

If you nail these three things: Have a precise and tailored audience, eye-catching, show-stopping design and offer value to the potential customer. You will get click-throughs – a lot of click-throughs.

We’re not over the line yet though, once a user clicks on your ad, it can still go horribly wrong.

Don't Let Your Landing Page Leak Business

Often neglected by non-marketing types. The landing page is as important as the ad itself and should be considered with as much care and attention as any part of your marketing funnel.

Your landing page is the part of the process that affects conversion rate. Meaning you can have the best Facebook Ad ever created and if your landing page is terrible you’ll not be making any money from it. 0% conversion on a campaign that delivers ten million visitors is £0.00p ROI.

So, what makes a good landing page?

Top of the list is UX (User Experience). People like the path of least resistance, if they’re on the page to book an appointment, make that easy to do. If it’s to buy a product, have a buy now button nice and visible. And, whatever you do… don’t have a complicated, long-winded checkout process.

0% conversion on a campaign that delivers ten million visitors is £0.00p ROI.

Tweet

Next up, make sure you have enough information on there to tip anyone that’s on the edge of purchasing fully over it. Again, this is not about features and benefits – it’s about adding value to their lives. If possible, use emotive imagery and language – provoke thoughts of the user having a better life with your product and/or service in it.

And, as always. Utilise design and your brand to add layers of trust and reputation.

Find a balance. The fact a user has clicked through shows intent so the priority should always be making the conversion as easy as possible. Think like a customer, not like the business owner, what do they want to see?

It’s unlikely you’re going to get a 100% conversion rate though – this is just life. Fortunately, Facebook makes it easy to try and catch any potential customers that your landing page does manage to let slip on their first visit – with retargeting.

Use Pixel

Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that sits on your website and monitors users that visit your site. This gives you a goldmine of information about how your ad campaign is performing. Audience data – for optimising your campaign (we’ll come onto that) and retargeting options.

Pixel will tell you how users behave once through to your site, the standard FB CTR and impressions metrics are good indicators. But, things like conversion rate, dwell time and page views are serious performance indicators and much more useful when reporting on a campaign or determining your return on investment.

Retargeting is also a hugely powerful tool. It’s not guaranteed that a user will buy on the first visit. It’s also not guaranteed that they’ll come back to your site to buy when they’re ready to – you could easily lose this customer to a competitor. With retargeting, Facebook allows you to set up an ad campaign aimed at users that have visited your site but didn’t become a customer – giving you another bite at the apple.

Pixel is FREE! And incredibly easy to implement on your website. There’re a host of videos online to help you with this if you’re unsure. It’s worth installing today.

Review and Optimise

Once your Facebook Ads are up and running – if you’ve followed the tips up to this point. You’ll be getting results.

But, now’s not the time to put your feet up.

Using the data you get from Facebook Pixel and your analytics; you should be trying to optimise your ad campaigns from as soon as a week or two into them running.

If you want to be extra clever, set up multiple audiences and creatives and test them for which get the best results.

This is all about trying to squeeze every drop out of your advertising spend. If an audience demographic converts at a much higher rate than any other – invest more of your budget in them. If one of your ad creatives gets a much lower CTR than the others – cull it. Even if it was your favourite.

There’s no arguing with data. If it proves your hunch wrong or surprises you – swallow it and make the changes. A great Facebook Ad campaign (or any digital marketing campaign for that matter) learns from itself.

Within a couple of months, you’ll be surprised at the difference in results the same spend level can achieve for you. You just have to use the information your campaign is giving you.

Summary

Hopefully, this article sheds some light on how to get more from Facebook Ads.

Make sure your audience is tailored and as targeted and relevant as possible. Design the most eye-popping ads you can and offer the potential customer value. Freebies, tasters and the like are a great way to do this.

Make sure your landing page is knockout – again tailored to the user and well designed.

And, finally, use data to continually optimise what you’re doing. Getting maximum results from your spend level.

Happy hunting!