5 Ways to Optimize Facebook Ads: 150K Case Study

HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY FOR YOUR MESSAGE TO BE SEEN 250 MILLION TIMES?

We are going to let you in on a little secret. Here is our Facebook Advertising Campaign Case Study for our e-commerce Daily Deal business. We spent $147,695.03 CAD (Approx. $110,000 USD) on Facebook ads. This resulted in 250+ MILLION impressions where  2.1 MILLION targeted consumers saw our ads 123 times each. What did this do for us? Drove millions of dollars in sales.  The best part? We sold other people products so there was ZERO RISK on our ad spend. If you are thinking about doing ANY Facebook Advertising. Here are the top 5 things you need to know to Optimize Facebooks Ads Campaigns:

**I had to blank out some of the areas with respect to the new owners as we sold our business. It still makes me laugh to this day when people ask if our business “organically” grew our Facebook Page to 40,000+ Likes and a massive email list of 50,000+ “local” subscribers HAHAHAHA.

1   TARGETING YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER

Here’s a funny example of how absolutely amazing Facebook is for targeting your ideal customer. One day, I decided to change my relationship status, to my girlfriends dismay. Why would I change my status? To see how the advertisements I see changed on Facebook. Originally I changed it from in a relationship to single, then from single to engaged, then engaged to married and so on, just so I could see how the different types of ads changed. They did not disappoint.

When my status was set to single, I had lots of different types of dating sites or singles events. In-a-relationship status was targeted with engagement rings. Engaged status had wedding planning and other destination wedding venues. Then when married status, had the traditional happy wife, happy life advertisements. With a mix of the cheating type of Ashley Madison sites LOL.

The point of my above hilarious story, is to display how detailed and targeted Facebook Ads can be. You can target by where you been, level of education, relationship, gender, your type of mobile device, how old your kids are, or how you vote. Heck, if you want to target a pot smoking recently widowed grandma living in Antarctic that is into solar – It’s possible, or at least very close.

The best way to come up with your ultimate target consumer is to run different smaller ad sets. Each ad set targeting different interests, geographic, and much more. Tracking your conversion on each ad set to see which converts more customers. In my example above, I had run 133 different campaigns. Each campaign sent customers  to different types of offers, landing pages, and demographics.

2   CHOOSE YOUR MARKETING OBJECTIVE

Facebook advertising has many different objectives for many different situations. When creating an ad, you can easily choose the description and function of each ad you run. I personally prefer to select “Boost Your Post”.  Boost your post allows you to promote content already launched from your own Facebook page and increases the engagement of that post. Make sure you are doing this from your Ads Manager vs just clicking the “Boost Post”.

Facebook changes, so your ad campaigns should adjust with them. One of the biggest changes we made, is not giving a damn about “promoting a page”. Our focus changed from focusing on getting likes or sending customers to a like-gate. Why? Because we are no longer advertising in the good old days when impressions from your page reached 30% of your fans. Those days are long and gone and we are forced to pay for engagement with fans. Facebook’s Fans to see your posts. As a tip of advice Facebook does not like you to leave their platform. Doing anything to stay within their platform (like get video views or events) tends to get me the lowest cost per click. AKA how you probably found us to begin with.

3   WHERE AND WHEN DO YOU WANT YOUR ADS TO BE SEEN?

After you understand who your target customer, you next need to think about their habits and when they are most likely to need your services. For example, I was reading a blog about a late night pizza delivery company that built their entire business from doing late night advertisements on Plenty Of Fish & Other Dating/Porn Websites for deliveries. They knew when their customers were most likely to want pizza delivery. Next is to consider the mode of delivery, whether you are targeting mobile or desktop.  Is the landing page the customer lands on optimized for that mode of delivery? From my e-commerce experience, I had far higher click through rate (CTR) from mobile devices. This resulted in cheaper click and email sign ups.  However, I had far more conversion happened from people sitting at their computers.

4  CREATE CUSTOM AUDIENCES

What is a custom audience?  A custom audience is a customer that has visited your website, that you can group into custom audiences to re-target specific ads too.  This is called Re-targeting or Re-marketing. Once you install the Facebook Pixel on your website, you will be able to create a series of custom audiences so your ads only show to customers who have visited your website.  You might be thinking, why? This customer has already visited my website and left, why should I target them again?  Stats show, it can take up to 7 touches for a customer to purchase from you.  So if they didn’t make the decision to buy from you the first time, re-target them till they do.

You can target your audiences with many different options. You can re-target visitors that viewed specific pages, existing customers that have already purchased, never opened your emails, or exclude customers or customers who have already subscribed.  As you can see, the ad customization and possibilities are endless. That puts you in the driver’s seat to ensure that your advertising budget is getting the best bang for it’s buck.

5 ACTUALLY SELL (OR GIVE AWAY SOMETHING) THAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY WANT.

The best branding, website, and big ad spend can’t do magic if what you are selling is something nobody wants. If the results are compared for selling products and services on Google or Facebook, we have experienced a far higher click through rate with Google (and conversions) but also costs a lot more per click.  If you are looking to build an audience (for example a mortgage broker looking to target realtors) Facebook hands down had generated a higher ROI for lead generation and selling a product or service they must have!

If you are reading this, you are probably arrived here because of one of our paid marketing techniques.  How effective do you think it is?  A lot of marketers do these very short email sign ups that do not give anything worthwhile, and we are not knocking that (well kinda) but we prefer to do long sales page with valuable content, then as described in #4 re-target you.  See you soon on our next small sales page after you have gotten to know and trust us because you want more and trust us. So if you made it this far you should just sign up for our FREE 7 day How to Fire Your Web Developer Course and get even more awesome content!