Have you been running Facebook ads with little or limited success? You’re not alone. Most people who run ads find they don’t get the results they’d hoped for. The trouble is that it’s so easy to start advertising on Facebook, most people set off without knowing how to do it properly. Spending money on Facebook is easy, getting results is not.
At Engage Web, we spent many years with Facebook ads before we reached the level we’re at now, where we’re able to help businesses achieve hundreds of leads per month or generate a ROAS (return on ad spend) well into the 20s and 30s – which means 20 or 30 times return on investment, or £20 -£30 back for every £1 spent on Facebook.
Getting results like this didn’t happen overnight. We’ve had to completely immerse ourselves in Facebook ads, spend thousands of hours on training from the best people in the industry and invest a substantial budget in development.
Now we’re getting the sort of results that many businesses can only dream of, and the sort of results that had one recent client utterly stunned.
So here are some tips we wanted to share on improving your Facebook ads.
Selecting the right image
This is something many people running Facebook ads often agonise over. How do you select the right image to use? It needs to be an image relevant to your business, relevant to your audience, yet professional and businesslike.
No, it doesn’t. Spending hours selecting the right image is a waste of your efforts. Now I’m not saying any old image will do and you should choose the first one you find – far from it. What I’m saying is the image has one job, and one job only. It’s NOT to portray your business in a professional manner and it’s NOT to sell your product or service. No, it’s simply to get people to stop scrolling and take notice of the ad.
That’s it.
When people are scrolling through their Facebook feed, often using their thumb while sat down in front of the TV or on the toilet, they will only stop scrolling at something that peaks their interest. The image you choose needs to make them take notice and stop scrolling so they read the first line of your ad. That’s all.
One of the worst things you can do is to look at your competitors’ ads and see what they’re doing, and then use similar images to the ones they are using. Why would you want your ads to look like someone else’s? You need your ad to be seen. To be read. It won’t be if the image is the same as every other ad.
Filter out an irrelevant audience
Would you advertise a butcher’s shop in a vegan magazine? Would you advertise a gentleman’s club in a knitting magazine? No, you’d be wasting your time, money and you’d most likely do nothing more than cause offense and bad publicity for your business. The same goes for Facebook. The UK audience on Facebook is roughly 45,000,000 people and, if left unchecked, is the size of the audience you’ll be showing your ads to. Depending on your service or product, the vast majority of that audience is irrelevant. Filter it.
Facebook gives you lots of filtering options to reduce the size of your audience, such as age, gender, interests, job titles, habits and location. You should use all of these to ensure the audience seeing your ads is relevant to what you’re selling or promoting.
A word of warning – Facebook does have an anti-discriminatory policy so you would be in breach of that policy if you used the audience filtering to discriminate against anyone; for example, if you were promoting a job listing and you only wanted to attract one gender, or you wanted to filter out any parents. Make sure you don’t do that.
Set your conversion
This is the part left out by most people running Facebook ads for the first time, especially if they just press that ‘Boost Post’ button. You should set the conversion for your ad, and optimise it for conversions. If you want sales on your ecommerce website, optimise the ads for purchases. If you want leads via a contact form, set that form as a conversion and optimise the ad for conversions. This means Facebook will show the ads to people most likely to convert, instead of people most likely to click on it, leave a comment, or share it.
You need to tell Facebook what you want as a conversion so it can help you get it. If you don’t tell it, it won’t know and you’ll be wasting your ad budget.
Have you spent money on Facebook ads in the past and never got anything back? I can virtually guarantee this was either the sole reason, or at least a big part of it.
Create a bespoke landing page
This is another extremely common error when running Facebook ads, and Google AdWords for that matter. Are you sending people to your website’s homepage? Are you sending them to your services page? Maybe to your contact form?
None of these options will work effectively. If you’re paying for traffic, as you would be doing with Facebook ads, you want to make sure every last one of those website visitors does what you want them to do. Rather than send them to your homepage, or indeed any other page on your website, you should create a bespoke landing page for them.
This page should have NONE of your website’s navigation. No ‘back to homepage’, no link to your blogs, no link to your services, none of it. It should, instead, have two options:
• Option 1 is to complete the conversion you want people to do. If that’s to send you an email, book a call, fill in a Calendly link or buy a product, then that’s all they should be able to do.
• Option 2 is to not do that and close the page down. Those are the two options. Complete the conversion or don’t.
Some people will say they need their website’s menu on their website. They need their homepage link. They need this, they need that and they need the other. No, they don’t. You’re paying for website traffic from Facebook so people can complete a conversion. Give them that as the only thing to do on the page. They either do it, or they leave.
So that’s four tips on how get better results from Facebook ads. There are, of course, many other tips and skills we use at Engage Web to get the great results we do from ads, and if you’d like to discuss how we can help you, we’d love to have a chat. Drop us an email via our contact form and we’ll book in a call.
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