There’s no question about it- Facebook is a “pay to play” platform. Currently, 93% of marketers use Facebook advertising regularly, which translates to 3 million businesses (Sprout Social). If your business isn’t part of that statistic, you are behind the eight ball. Furthermore, organic reach is all but dead, essentially requiring business pages to spend money on Facebook advertising. But, just because you shell out funds on Facebook doesn’t mean you are guaranteed quality results or value for what you spend.
Spending money will increase your reach and engagement, but it won’t necessarily meet your ads objectives or expectations. That’s because Facebook judges your ads and only shows them to the highest number of people at the best rate if the ad is deemed relevant.
Quite simply, if the ad is not relevant, your ad won’t convert and you will be wasting money. Here are 3 ways to increase conversions on your Facebook ads.
Make Sure Your Targeting is Correct
Facebook’s ad platform has robust targeting options. Targeting age, geography or gender are the most basic options, with Facebook offering far more complex options, from purchase behavior to household size.
However, just because there are hyper specific targeting options doesn’t necessarily mean that is the best route to take when attempting to reach your target audience.
For example, a Facebook Website Traffic campaign targeting CEOs/Presidents in Miami, Florida is a very specific audience, which wouldn’t yield great results.
As you can see, Facebook deems this audience size too specific and you wouldn’t get much bang for your buck.
If you want to convert at a better rate, it’s actually more effective to cast a wider net and be more broad with your targeting. One option is to simply specify a city, age range and one interest (such as CEO), where you will reach significantly more people. Doing this will guarantee you reach some people that won’t care about your ad, but it also guarantees that the net is wide enough to reach people in your target demographic, and also people that may be interested in your ad that you wouldn’t have found in the hyper specific option.
The key takeaway is here never get too specific and limit yourself to 1 or 2 interests at most.
Other targeting tips:
- If you want to only find people that live in the city you are targeting and filter out people that are just visiting, make sure to change “Locations” from “Everyone in this location” to “People who live in this location.”
- Try the “Narrowing Audience” feature if you are using multiple interests to refine your audience
Use the Remarketing Feature
Generating sales from Facebook is just like any other form of sales – it’s better to nurture a potential client than just hit them with “Buy Now.” On Facebook, lead generation campaigns are a great way to produce warm leads, but it’s not always smart to start with lead gen ads.
Start with an engaging 1-minute video and blast it out to your target market with a reasonable budget. If you had a successful campaign with lots of views and engagement, you can then remarket the people that not only watched the video, but also the people that liked, commented and shared the video.
If people have shown interest in your ad/product in the past, you will likely see your conversions increase if you retarget those same people, who are now a warm audience.
Optimize Your Website for Conversions
Once a user shows interest in your ad and clicks through to your website, your ad delivered on its objective. But now that a potential customer has landed on your website, you need to make sure your website is optimized for conversions or that traffic is worthless.
This begins with a landing page that inspires people to take action, whether that is filling out a form or making an appointment for a consultation. Since this will likely be occurring on a mobile phone, your landing page must also be optimized for mobile.
The key points your landing page should feature:
- Make sure your landing page has the same message as the Facebook ad so people don’t get confused.
- Make sure the design, such as the colors and photos are also the same as the Facebook ad.
- Utilize a Call to Action
- Use a good form optimization tool to highlight any problems your forms are causing
If you utilize these 3 tips, you will see more conversions with your Facebook ads.