Watch Your Conversion Rate

One of the biggest misconceptions about setting up a Facebook Ad Campaign is whether it can be a good source of traffic. Whether people buy stuff from your online store or not.

For every positive story you hear of merchants killing it with Facebook traffic, you probably hear dozens more merchants who are frustrated with Facebook.
They really cannot make heads or tails of Facebook’s traffic, as far as their eCommerce sales are concerned. They just cannot, for the life of them, convert a heavy volume of traffic from social networks into actual buyers.

The bottom line is that there are many horror stories of low eCommerce conversions. I’m not saying that there are absolutely no conversions at all. Nobody can make that claim.
But the problem is, that you cannot run a successful online store with a few sales here and there. You need some sort of stability. You need some sort of increasing or at least, a stable predictable conversion rate. You need some sort of minimum baseline of predictable conversions.

The reason why a lot of people have these horror stories is because they focus on the direct sale. They think that if they post an ad on Facebook selling some sort of trinket and if they show it to enough eyeballs, that people would buy.
That is a common misconception about Facebook and this can get expensive very quickly. It really can. This pretty much makes up the bulk of low eCommerce conversion horror stories involving Facebook.
They are all about a direct ad that fails to generate that direct sale.

The Truth About Facebook Conversion Rates

Here is the good news. Facebook can deliver eCommerce sales. However, oftentimes, it is not in the form that you would like. Seriously. You have to be more creative. How does this work?
Well, Facebook traffic can convert if you retarget.

In other words, people who have found your website on their own and who have gone to internal pages might have a Facebook account. The next time they log on to their Facebook account at the same time you are running a retargeting campaign, your ads will be visible to them. Your ads will remind them to go back to your page. This has been proven to increase ROI.
Facebook can also deliver eCommerce sales through squeeze page marketing. In other words, you use Facebook to recruit people to your mailing list. It is your mailing list that is doing the heavy lifting, as far as selling stuff to your list members go.

Another way Facebook can deliver eCommerce results through your business is through a Facebook Page boost. You create a Facebook Page and your target lookalike audience is based on the interest of people who already like your page.
Then, you send out content. Using this content, you can profile the interests of the typical high-engagement members of your page. Once you get this very important piece of consumer intelligence, you can then run a lookalike audience campaign on Facebook targeting people with those same interests.

The idea is: if you know the interest of the person who buys from you and you advertise to another person with the same set of interests, the chance of that second person buying is much higher than a complete and total stranger.

The bottom line? Yes. Facebook can deliver eCommerce sales, but you have to use its tools the right way. You can’t just go in there, advertise an affiliate link, a direct link to your Shopify store, or a direct link to your product, and expect a sale. It doesn’t work that way. Sure, you can convert every once in a while, but chances are you are not going to get the results you are looking for. You have to use it using the techniques outlined above.

What Is True and Want Is Not

Perhaps you have heard that ad retargeting enables merchants to bring customers back to their shopping carts so they can buy something. That is absolutely true.
It does not work 100% of teh time, but it works enough to make quite a bit of difference. Similarly, ad retargeting also enables merchants to drive people back to content pages that would eventually convert customers into paying buyers. That part is true as well.

However, despite all the excitement about ad retargeting technology, there is a secret sauce that you cannot ignore. Seriously. If you understand how the secret sauce works, then you will know how to craft together a more effective ad retargeting campaign. On the other hand, if you remain clueless regarding this element, chances are your campaign will probably be hit or miss.
Oftentimes, it is more of a miss than a hit.
What secret sauce am I talking about? Proven interest. That is right. When people come to your website, they have a proven interest. Ad regarding essentially give you a tool to bring those people back to your website. However, there is the problem. If you are just going to bring them back to the home page, you are wasting your time. Real proven interest boils down to internal pages. That is when you know that this person is serious. That is when you know that this person actually is engaged enough with your content that they would go to internal pages.

I am not just talking about one main page. I am talking about secondary pages or other internal pages. In fact, the deeper you get them into your website, the better the results. This means that they have looked through other content, they have somehow figured out how everything works, and they are more likely to convert later on. This is why if you are running an ad retargeting campaign, it is really important to focus on bringing back people who have gone into an internal page and not just the home page.

Two Ways To Retarget

Now that you fully understand that ad retargeting is all about getting people who have gone to an internal page to come back, there are two ways to retarget.
You can remind them to go back to where they left off. Maybe this is a purchase page. Maybe it is a shopping cart. Maybe it is some sort of article that goes into a conversion page with one click. Whatever the case may be, you just remind people to go back to your website and they end up where they left off.

The other way you can retarget is to pull them deeper into your website. This is an often neglected strategy when it comes to ad retargeting, but this is actually quite powerful. You have to understand that not anybody is going to interact with your content the exact same way. Some people will find themselves very deep into your site, and others will find themselves on a fairly shallow or common secondary page.
The key here is to pull them deeper from that page, but not necessarily drive them to a sales page. In other words, you are just going to be pulling them deeper into your content, but not necessarily dumping them into a shopping cart, sales page, or any other type of conversational page.

This is how you get better sales. You condition the minds of the visitors so they voluntarily drill deeper into your site until they eventually convert.

Maximize Ad Retargeting Results

How do you take your results to the next level? It is very simple. Instead of pushing sales with your content retargeting, push your squeeze page. This is the page that recruits people to your mailing list. It will be your mailing list that will do teh heavy lifting of converting that visitor into a buyer.

Of course, if you already have people showing up in your shopping cart, then your ad retargeting should focus on bringing them back to teh shopping cart. But outside of that, if you are dealing with people who stop short at content pages, push them to sign up to your squeeze page and let your mailing list convert them eventually.

Demographic Profiling Reduces Your Costs

One of the biggest challenges to Facebook Marketing is paying too much per click. This is one of the most common rookie mistakes people make when they try their hand at marketing on Facebook. They focus on coming up with the best looking ad, but they get their interest targeting wrong.
They end up paying $0,75 to even $1,00 or more per ad click. As you can imagine, this can get really expensive quickly. This is where demographic user interest profiling comes in. You have to figure out teh right people who engage with your ad the most.

Facebook will show your ad a certain amount of times and then, it would automatically price your clicks based on an auction model. If it turns out that a lot of the people seeing your ad don’t want to click through, your click-per-rate goes up. But if it turns out that for every 100 exposures of your ad, a lot of people click through, your ad gets shown more and teh click rate remains low. This is why demographic and user interest targeting are so important.

How Do You Get This Demographic Information?

Well, people who fail with Facebook marketing simply make up demographics. They make educated guesses as to who their target audience members are and they just run with it. These people usually end up with very little results.

The better approach would be to build a Facebook Fan Page, promote it organically, and let it attract a natural amount of organic likes. These are real people. You did not pay for these likes. These people were not forced to like your page. After enough time has passed, you use the page demographics of your user base to launch lookalike audience campaigns to promote your website or promote your link. The key here is to find teh most active and engaged demographic. Using your Facebook Page audience insights will definitely clue you in on which subgroup of users to target teh most.

The Worst Mistake You Can Ever Make On Facebook

While you can afford to screw up on content selection or engagement strategy on Facebook, there is one thing that you cannot do. It is simply off-limits to you. Don’t even think about it. What I am talking about? Do not buy page likes or post likes.
Seriously. No joke. Real story. You probably have heard that you can get lots of social proof if you buy fake users or fake likes. You probably have heard from hypesters and other hucksters on online marketing forums that if your account has enough likes, others will be drawn to you. Real users will be drawn to you. Well, that may be true but you will be paying a high price for this fake social proof. Your engagement levels will suffer and most of your page fans will never get to see your content. If you think that is bad enough, wait, it gets even worse. If you were to pay for an ad campaign on Facebook, chances are your lookalike audience profile will not work.

The solution? Just don’t use fake likes or buy followers in the first place!

Pick The Winning Content

As I mentioned previously, one of the best ways to build up your Facebook Page is to not come up with orginal content. At least, not in the beginning. You should look at your competitor’s Facebook Pages and find their very best content.
You should then publish these pieces of content on your page and study your statistics very carefully.

• Which of your posts gets shared the most?
• Which ones get commented on the most?
• Which ones get liked teh most?

Once you are able to figure out the specific pieces of content that get the most engagement, you should be able to see a larger pattern. You should be able to see that certain pieces of content simply draw a lot more attention. They engage your users more.

Your job then, is to pick out these winning pieces of content. You look for related or similar types of content and publish those on your site. Eventually, you come up with your own version. If you do it right, your engagement lever will be the same as the materials produced by third-party publishers.
That is how you will know that you are doing this right.

How To Pick The Very Best Content?

Now it is one thing to say that you are going to pick the best content your competitors have, it is another to actually do it the right way. You see, the big danger here is you are going to be using your opinion as to what the best content means.
I am telling you, it is not about you. People don’t care about what you like or don’t like. What they care about is what they like. It is all about them. So, how do you use this as a winning strategy?

It is actually very simple. You look at your competitors’ Facebook Pages and scan through their posts. Which of their posts is the most popular? Which of their posts gets shared a lot, gets the most likes, or gets the most comments?
Pull the link for those posts and post them on your page. See if you get the same level of engagement. If you do this enough times with many different competitors’ content, certain patterns emerge.

You would quickly realize that the audience you have built up, to this point, is more likely to engage with certain types of content than others. You figure out what works and you ditch everything else. That is right. You forget about them, you focus on the stuff that works, and then you scale them up.
You publish more of it and eventually, you come up with your own version. That is how you play the game. It is not a question of hunches or guesses. You have to look at objective indications of popularity such as page likes, comments, shares, and other types of engagement.

I hope you see how this works. If you do this right, you will be able to put up a fairly compelling Facebook Page that can lead to conversions later on.

Achieve Realistic Results With Facebook Ad Campaign

As you probably already know, when you run a paid campaign on Facebook, its ad platform allows you to collect leads. That’s right. You can run a lead generation campaign. The problem is there are so many myths and misconceptions surrounding lead generation on Facebook that you will probably fail.
I don’t mean to depress you. I definitely don’t say that to discourage you, but let’s get real here. If you believe in these misconceptions, then chances are you are just setting yourself up for a let-down.

One of the most powerful myths, that is very hard to shake, is that straight lead opt-ins can be had for cheap on Facebook. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I see tweets about this for marketers all the time.
These are people who know their way around Facebook. These are not people who just tried Facebook or are in any way, shape, or form wet behind their ears. These are veterans.
All I can see is the complaining, moaning, and groaning that it is just too expensive. In fact, one person was saying that in here niche, you basically had to spend $80 just to get a lead. Now, you probably already know that a lead is very different from a sale and that $80 per lead is very expensive.

How do you make things better for yourself if you are running a Facebook lead generation campaign? How do you set yourself up in such a way that you don’t end up like these people who are complaining that generation leads is just too expensive or downright impossible? Well, it is actually quite easy.

Follow The Steps Below And You Will See That It Is Not As Difficult As Many Say

Find Competitors and Figure Out Their Freebies

The first thing that you need to do is to like your competitors’ pages and join their groups. This way, you set up your user profile to be targeted by their ads. Find their ads and figure out what they are using for freebies.
What will this tell you? First of all, it will tell you what kind of incentives are available. It also tells you that nine times out of ten, your competitors have tested their campaign. This means that if you keep seeing the same type of freebie come up again and again, chances are that should be the kind of freebie you should be offering.
They are not doing it for their health. They are doing it because they have nothing else better to do. They did not just take some wild stab in the dark to come up with people somehow, somehow they got results from that. Stick to that.

Figure Out How They Offer The Freebie

You have to understand that to generate a lead on Facebook or any other platform, you give out a freebie in exchange for an email. So, the key here is to figure out how they position the freebie.
Are they saying that it saves you money? Are they saying that it is some sort of secret hack or trick to save time, effort, and money?
How exactly do they position it? Pay attention to this because you are going to copy and optimize what they are doing. I am not saying you should copy and paste. I am saying you should copy and optimize. This is different.

Run a Long-Term Campaign

The next step to success is to accept the fact that you are going to run a long-term campaign. You are going to run an ad, after an ad and you are going to resolve to fail quickly. In other words, you are going to spend very little money on each ad as you test it out.
You figure out the ad that works best and then you optimize it to try to improve its conversion rate. Using an elemental approach, you should be able to identify the ad that works best for you.- You keep running these long-term campaigns while focusing on successful ads. These lower your total campaign cost.
Keep optimizing until you find the best results for the lowest amount of cash.

The bottom line is for you to keep running these ads, focusing on the best-converting ones, and then keep optimizing them until you find the best results for the lowest amount of cash.

You then scale up your campaign by increasing the amount of money you pay for the ads. This ensures that you get a lot more eyeballs and if your ads are optimized right, your ad will be converting at an optimal rate.

Wrapping Up

If you fail to follow these tips, your Facebook Ad Campaign will be a complete and total waste of time, effort, and money. It will really be.

The most common mistake people make with a Facebook Ad Campaign is to set up ads and then just let them rip. Why? Because they don’t optimize them. They don’t even pay attention to their results. They just set up a date, let’s say $1 a day for 14 days, and then they let them run.

So, optimize your Facebook Ad Campaign well, and before you even set up your campaign do your homework. Studying your competitors well and try to make an even better Facebook Ad Campaign.

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