If you are into Social media marketing then you’ll know the importance of Facebook in bringing highly targeted traffic and sales to your website or Landing page. Nowadays you can find most of the businesses having their own Facebook page, and promoting their business through Facebook posts.
Owning a Facebook page is quite similar to having your own website. There are many people who even started selling their products in their Facebook community even before they had their own website.
That shows the Traffic and sales people are able to generate from Facebook, but due to Facebook’s recent Algorithm Updates, you can expect a continued decrease in Organic Page reach for your business page. Facebook itself admits that the organic reach will be falling short for brand posts and urges it’s users to buy Facebook Ads for a better reach.
You can read more about that in here ->http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/05/facebook-organic-reach/
Facebook ads are not as scary as most people tend to think. In fact with proper monetizing techniques, you can actually receive Likes, Clicks, and even Shares for as little as 1 cent each and this is Targeted traffic we’re talking about (those people who are interested in your market, product and services).
In this article we’ll discuss ways in which you can attract more Quality fans for your Page and how to market to your existing fans with different types of Facebook Ads.
1. Attracting Quality Fans via Facebook Engagement Ads
1. Engagement ads are ads which usually keep Facebook users inside Facebook itself, instead of leading them to a Landing Page or an External Link.
2. You can monetize engagement ads by making the user like your Facebook page using relevant, thought-provoking questions which stir up User’s Emotions. Keeping in mind that the Title and description which you use should always be relevant to your market.
3. Targeted, potential fans don’t have to visit your page, or leave what they are doing. Making people leave their page or stop what they are doing will decrease your CTR (Click through Rate)dramatically. It’s better to make them simply like the ad and become a fan of your page. If you do this, they will receive updates about your business or company in their newsfeed.
2. Re-Engaging Your Existing Fans with Facebook’s Promoted Posts
Promoted Posts Ads work best when you already have a good number of Facebook fans on your Page. These types of ads are status updates for which you pay to make them Dominant in their newsfeed. Promoted post ads can only be seen by your Fans and the Friends of your fans, in order to use promoted posts ads to their full potential, make sure that you have at least 1000+ fans on your Facebook Page. Whenever you use “Promote a post”, you will notice the word, “Sponsor” in the lower right corner of your post.
3. Targeting Other Users with Page Post Ads
1. For targeting other users which are interested in your market, you can use Page Post ads which we’ll discuss in a bit.
2. Page Post ads are the status updates on your wall which you turn into Facebook Ads, in Ads Manager you can create them using “Page Post Engagement”.
3. There are many ways to monetize Page Post ads as follows:
i. They can be used to increase engagement of your Facebook Page,
ii. They can be used to generate leads by sending traffic to your Landing page in Facebook Apps, or
iii. They can be used to sending targeted traffic to a website outside of Facebook.
4. While running Page Post Ads, you’ll also keep getting automatic likes, Shares and Comments on your recent posts of your Facebook page as well. This increases the number of “People talking about the Page” as well.
Now that you know the basic of Facebook advertising, let’s go into a bit more detail about monetizing your Facebook ads and how you can generate cheap 1-2 cents Likes and Clicks from your targeted audience.
I have found that one of the best ways to generate cheap traffic from Facebook is to monetize your Facebook page and then drive traffic from there. Facebook charges are considerably less for CPC (Cost per Click) ads when the links are internal to Facebook, compared to CPC ads when they are linked to an external website or landing page. By creating a Landing page within Facebook and then link this page to your websites you can save on your CPC campaigns.
Now in order to receive the best benefit of your Facebook Ads, you should have Power Editor Installed. Power Editor is a Google Chrome Plugin that helps advertisers in improving their ads by efficiently creating, editing and managing a large number of campaigns through this software.
Power Editor also has operations like Mass-editing for your Facebook ads, adding targeted audiences, setting up your ad budgets, bids, dates, and even the accounts. You can also monitor your ad statics in order to optimize your ads and campaigns, all from within these tools. Just as important, by using Power Editor you can manage your Custom Audience and Mobile device targeting (This can create a huge impact if you are into Lead generation).
You can download power editor from here -> https://www.facebook.com/help/194355723944655/
You can find various guides on power editor, it’s always best to go through it once before you step into Facebook advertising.
Now, before I proceed with marketing strategies, there’s one more thing I’d like to cover.
4. Ad Pricing and Your Budget
This can become quite tricky to understand. Listed below are a couple of things which you need to understand about pricing details.
When you choose your ad pricing, you’ll get three Options.
1. Bid For Likes, Post Engagement, Website clicks, etc. (Auto Bids)
2. Bid For Clicks
3. Bid For Impressions
Auto Bid – This option always changes, depending on the type of Facebook ad which you want to use. These are called Auto Bids. Try running your first ad with Auto bids if you are new, to see how many Clicks, Likes, etc. received from auto bids. No matter what anyone says, it can be a good learning experience to try this for yourself.
CPC – with this type of Pricing, you will be charged every time someone clicks on your ads
CPM – You will be paying per 1,000 impressions, i.e. the number of times that your advert is displayed on someone’s news feed or right column ads.
Personally, I prefer to start with CPC. It’s a fact that when dealing with Facebook ads, your CTR (Click through Rate) will be quite low, therefore depending on how effective your advert is at receiving Clicks, it may be less expensive than CPM (number of impressions).
I have seen people who receive a CTR of 0.02% and 0.002% as well. After all, Facebook is not a search engine like Google, Yahoo and Bing. People go to Facebook for networking, connecting and spending time with their friends, sharing and sending messages, etc… not searching for companies with products and services to buy from.
In order to profit from Facebook advertising, you must know how to attract and distract your targeted audience from continuing their daily routine. This isn’t an easy process and can be one of the reasons why a number of people stop using Facebook advertising after running only a couple of ads. Here are some useful tips which you might find helpful in making successful adverts.
Suggested Bids
Suggested Bids à When you select your ad pricing, Facebook will give you a “Suggested Bid” for your ad. It will look something like this: “Suggested Bid: $0.92 — $2.24 USD”
Tip à Always try to lower the first part of your Suggested bid, which in the above case is $0.92. The more you lower your minimum bid, the cheaper your clicks will be. This can be done by increasing your target audience. In order to gain cheap Clicks, you should have above 2 Mil targeted audience selected. i.e. the larger your audience, the better you chance of receiving more clicks. If you have a CTR of 0.02%, this is 2 clicks for 10,000 views, so if you have an audience of 1,000,000, you should receive around 200 clicks.
Don’t place a bid in this box which is lower than your minimum suggested bid. This is because when you start your ad, you want to get as many clicks as possible and if you lower the value of your bid, then your ad won’t be seen as many times. Even if it does get displayed, because there is no one else bidding for this market, it will be displayed in the least visible areas on the right hand column so there is a very minimal chance that you’ll get any clicks as it won’t be seen.
Max Bids
An example of a good Max Bid for the above, would be something like $1.45 per click. Don’t worry about the price, you won’t be actually paying this amount for every click. This is your maximum bid which you are happy to pay per click. The higher the number of people in your audience that you have, the less you’ll have to pay for your clicks. I have seen people put $1.45 for Max Bid per click when their suggested bids were $0.04 to $0.95 and paying only $0.02 per click.
Facebook Ads are considered more powerful because of their Audience Targeting Options. Think about it this way, where else would you find a portal (either on-line or in real life), where someone adds so much information about themselves, their hobbies and likes. With Facebook advertising, it is possible to target exactly who you want.
Testing Your Facebook Ads
It’s actually quite tough to pin down a successful strategy for Facebook ads unless you do some split testing yourself. Your target audience will always differ with other companies depending on their market. Therefore try a number of different adverts with smaller groups until you have identified your best target audience and your most successful advert. Then once you have this, increase your spend and audience to improve your success in your desired market place.
There are a couple of things to consider while split testing your Facebook ads.
Listed below are simple strategies which you can use to improve your testing method.
1. While running your ad, make sure that you change only one variable at a time, i.e. The main variables in Facebook ads are: The Title, The Image, the Description and your targeted audience. If you make too many changes at once you won’t know what change made the difference.
2. Another thing you need to do is to keep similar ad conditions for both split tests, i.e. the Day, the bid amounts, the length of the ad, etc… If they aren’t exactly the same, then you are comparing 2 different ad campaigns which won’t give you accurate figures, i.e. like comparing apples with oranges.
3. Make sure that you don’t edit those ads which don’t perform well. It’s best to keep them as it is and create a new similar ad with a couple of changes so that you can compare the statics later on.
4. If you are into lead generation, then try to split test your landing page as well. Facebook ads allow a call to action. There is no harm in using them in your landing page as well in order to get a good conversion rate. One of the best practices would be to design multiple landing pages in your website, and see which one is performing best on a specific day, with a specific title and description.
5. Compare all your statistics i.e. Impressions and/or views of the advert, clicks, views on the landing page and enquiries received. Each tells you a different story and let you know what is working as follows:
a. Impressions and/or views of the advert – This is the view-able part of advert on the news feed or right hand column and can determine if your Suggested Bid is too low if you aren’t receiving many impressions.
b. Clicks – This indicates how many clicks on your advert and CTR (Click Through Rate) is determined by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions to give you an idea of how successful your advert is.
c. Views on the landing page – This should be the same or similar to the number of clicks.
d. Enquiries Received – This is similar to the Clicks on Facebook where you can determine how successful your landing page is based on the number of enquiries divided by the number of views on your landing page.
6. Last thing to keep in mind is to rotate your ads, once an ad is used on the same audience over and over again, it stops getting as many clicks as it used to.
5. Facebook Graph Search
Now that you’re familiar with the type of Facebook ad strategies, let’s move on to Research part of Facebook advertisement and the use of a very important tool called “Facebook Graph Search”.
It’s a must that before you plan to run an ad campaign, try to find information about your market sector and start researching on Facebook tactics. You need to know who your markets are and understand who your clients should be. Then understand how you can promote your company/products/services to these potential audiences. Check the groups which they are members of, check their followers and the people they are following.
Facebook graph search is one of the best tools you can find. It is usually used to build up your audience. You try to capture a person’s interest from a certain topic to your page, product or services. If you are not familiar with Facebook graph search then you can find all the details regarding this in here -> https://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch . This also explains how to use it as well.
Once you know how to use graph search, you can start playing around with it as well, you can use various phases like:
· People that work/who work at ______
· Groups named “ Your customers”
· Groups named “ Product name/ Service of a Competitor”
As mentioned above, play around with graph searches a bit, and you can easily find the targeted audience, or even paid customers. Use different Synonyms and do a research using works like clients, consumers, members, Shoppers, Prospects, affiliates, associates, VIP Members, etc…
Also, look for open Facebook groups and closed Facebook groups as well. This is one of the best places to find paying buyers who are already purchasing products related to your market. In closed Facebook groups you can find someone’s customer or even clients, people who have bought something from your competitors hence they can actually be perfect targets for your Facebook ads.
Now you may be wondering, what to do after you’ve come across a lot of closed, open groups, of your customers. Well that’s where UID (User ID) extraction tools come in. You can find various products who already do this for you. Just Google and you will have ample products to choose from. Just make sure to check out the product review beforehand. Many UID tools don’t function as promoted by the developers. A tool which offers a trial for a couple of days or even a month can be a good thing to start with. Just to get used to Extracting UID from Open and Closed groups.
Now once you have a list of UID (User ID) of your potential clients, you can simply upload them to your Facebook advertising account with the help of Power Editor and start generating ample leads and sales.
One last tip which I would want to end this article with is to make sure that you don’t judge the performance of an ad on the 1st day itself. I have noticed that usually, the ad which performs worst on the 1st day may generate astonishing CTR on the 2nd and 3rd day. So before evaluating the worth of a Facebook campaign let it run for at least a week. There are days where users are more active and depending on your market, it may vary. Keep Experimenting in order to get the best results. Mistakes happen, but if you learn from your mistakes and successes, they will help you to create more successful ads in the future.
Read More: Facebook’s New Disguised Ads Draw Ire.