Facebook ads have become a huge source of revenue for many businesses.
But how do you convert those ads into sales?
The answer is simple: just follow these tips to lower your cost per purchase and get your Facebook advertising campaign back on track.
What are Facebook conversion ads?
Conversion ads are advertisements on Facebook that lead to a conversion event. These conversions events can be purchases, signups, or other lead generation actions like filling out surveys and booking a call on the company’s website.
To launch a conversion campaign on Facebook, you’ll need a conversion pixel on your website and the Facebook Pixel installed.
If you are looking to convert Facebook ads to sales, we suggest opting for a conversion campaign or a catalog sales campaign. After a lot of testing these two types of facebook ads have the highest conversion rates.
How do I track Facebook Ad campaigns conversions?
The first step in launching any campaign is installing the relevant tracking codes to allow the users behavior to be tracked by the Facebook ads manager across multiple pages. It’s also a great reference to not only rely on Facebook for tracking but to also set up Google Analytics (that’s another article) so you can analyze multiple data sources and optimize your marketing efforts.
The installation consists of enabling conversion tracking in Facebook ads manager, copying over the pixel code from the platform to their corresponding section of the website or landing page, then adding an event for this new page to track the actions of website visitors in ads manager.
Now that we are able to track the performance of the conversion campaigns, we need to look at how do we increase the conversion rate of campaigns to our target audience and increase revenue.
It all starts with targeting.
Exploring your customer persona’s interests, goals and motivations will help you design an ad campaign that appeals to their interests improving your conversion rate.
It’s been shown that running multiple ads with different targeting on Facebook can be more effective than just running one targeted ad. This is because of the increase in impressions for each individual conversion ad meaning a higher chance of a click-through and ultimately a visit to your website.
Facebook provides a variety of targeting options to help you reach your target audience. Some of the most prominent are by age, location, interests, and language.
Targeting Options:
Age: To reach your target audience on Facebook based on their age, advertisers will select a specific age range that they want to advertise to. These ranges can be anywhere from 18 and up or 25-34.
Location: Targeting specific geographic locations is also possible on Facebook. Regions, cities, zip codes, or specific addresses are all possible targets when it comes to location.
Interests: Interests are another great way for advertisers to target potential audiences and get them interested in products. Advertisers simply have to enter keywords related to their products to target users.
Language: The language of audiences can also be targeted so that they’ll see your ads in their native tongue if you know it, or a translated version if not.
Retargeting is another popular option for many marketers as well. Retargeting allows advertisers to show potential customers (custom audiences) who have left a site but aren’t ready to convert, a message again with an advertisement.
Retargeting is done through the use of pixel codes which identify website visitors as leads and follow them around on other websites that have retargeted ads set up in order to remind them about products they looked at previously.
In general, conversion rates will be higher when targeting specific interests, locations, or age ranges and coupling it with a strong call to action.
Create a Facebook campaign that retargets existing customers
Need to extract the highest value from your Facebook advertising traffic without spending a lot of money? This section will cover best practices for small business to get the most value from their Facebook budget.
The secret is to focus on the low-hanging fruit with your advertising campaigns, this means advertising to the customers closest to conversion.
Create a Facebook Website Custom Audience of your existing customers. Impressions to users in this audience are the most valuable because they are more likely to convert higher than any other type of impression, and it’s also one of the easiest ways to find these people on Facebook.
Another audience that you will want to target is your email list, upload a copy of your CRM list, or scrape customer data from the website and import it into Facebook with one click. Facebook has created some convenient CSV files to help with this process.
Types of ads to run for more sales
Images, videos, carousels, or collection ads the choices are endless. We’ll cover what each one is and how they work.
Image ads are great for grabbing attention and telling a story about your company or products without needing to write anything out in text form.
Video Ads can be used as an introduction video, testimonial, or even a business profile that shows the personality of your brand on Facebook with captions and subtitles.
Carousel ads are an excellent choice for a high volume or a large number of products to showcase on Facebook that allows users to swipe through different options and end up purchasing from your company.
Collection Ads work best when you’re promoting a new product line, collection, sale, or bundle by showing off the items in order with quantity and pricing.
It is almost impossible to know which format will work best for your brand until you upload to the platform and hit publish. Our recommendation is to create multiple ad formats and test their performance.
The importance of ad copy
The ad copy is the text that will be featured on your Facebook ads. Even though it may seem like a small detail, it can make or break an advertisement and should always be written in advance with other elements of the campaign.
A few best practices to keep in mind when writing for social media ads are:
-Features vs benefits: Features list a new product’s features. Benefits show how the customer will benefit from those features
-Selling to people vs selling with people: When writing for social language aimed at customers, it is important to use phrases that are geared more towards selling products and less about you
-Avoid words that are negative: When writing ads for social media there is a risk of using keywords in your ad copy that can send people away from clicking on them. This includes words like “free”, “no catch” and other phrases that have a negative connotation.
And finally make sure that your ad copy is compliant with the ad policies for Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms. Facebook has an infamous track record of banning pages that’s ads go against its policies.
Constantly monitor, tweak and refine campaigns
Once you have the perfect combination of targeting, copy, creativity and a killer call to action, it’s time to launch your campaigns. As a rule of thumb, you should always leave a new campaign run for at least 24 hours or 5,000 impressions before tweaking and refining.
Monitoring campaign performance and keeping on top of stats will help you to know when it’s time to adjust. We like to recommend that you focus on the most important metrics then work backwards to troubleshoot.
As a Facebook ads agency our first port of call is always ROAS.
ROAS is the revenue generated from the Facebook advertisement divided by the campaign’s overall spend. This is a great way to measure whether you’re meeting your goals for ROAS as well as if there are any opportunities to increase conversion rates and overall profit margins.
If everything is good here, it may be worth increasing your budget or focusing on other areas.
The other area we look at immediately when checking a campaign is CAC. The cost per acquisition, or CAC.
This number is how much it costs you to convert each customer from your Facebook campaigns.
Once we identify something is off with these two Facebook ad metrics, we begin working through the other metrics from start to finish to see how we can improve the conversion of our audience by monitoring.
- Cost per outbound click
- Cost per content view
- Cost per add to cart
- Cost per initiate checkout
Depending on where the raise in cost occurs, will heavily influence how we choose to optimize the campaign or our website.
Not Working? Check for these common problems
Here are some of the most common mistakes that people make when using Facebook ads-not testing different ad formats, not monitoring campaigns, not setting a budget or not giving them time to work before optimizing. We’ll show you how each one is done incorrectly so that you can avoid these common errors.
The first mistake is not testing different ad formats. It’s important to remember that there are many types of Facebook ads so it’s worth your time exploring all of them before settling on just one! You should try out many different formats like Collection Ads, conversion ads, video ads, carousel ads and more to see which ones work best for your business.
The second mistake is not monitoring campaigns. Implementing a strategy of checking-in on Facebook Ads every day will give you the opportunity to notice trends in performance that can be optimized for better conversion rates down the line.
The third mistake is not setting a budget. One of the most common mistakes people make when using Facebook Ads is that they forget to set a budget and then end up wasting their money! It’s important to spend your ad dollars wisely, so always be sure you have one from the start.
The fourth mistake is giving them time before optimizing. Most campaigns will need at least 24 hours to see results and potentially up to 180 days before you can say for sure whether it’s working or not. Give your campaign time in order to determine what the best course of action is, as opposed to jumping right into optimization without knowing what could be wrong.
Conclusion:
We hope these tips have helped you to better understand how Facebook ads work and the importance of marketing on this platform.
When working out how to convert Facebook ads to sales, it’s really important to consider that it is a combination of a number of factors.
For a strong facebook conversion rate, we are reliant on a landing page that is designed for conversions. A Facebook ad campaign that provides your audience with a strong call to action.
Then you need to run some traffic and begin to optimize your marketing efforts.
