I have spent a fair amount of time learning how to advertise on Facebook effectively with traffic & lead generation in mind as part of my wider social media marketing strategy.
I’ve spent a good chunk of cash experimenting
Today I’m going to share everything I have learnt with you step by step!
An effective Facebook advertising marketing campaign has-
Clearly defined goals
Email auto responder
A compelling offer
A landing page
Once you have those things in place you can start setting up your Facebook ads.
I’m going to take you through each of these and show you how easy it is to set everything up step by step.
Defining Goals
First you need to define the goals of your campaign.
This is going to vary depending on your business but I have found the most effective way to reach people is via the classic email opt in process.
Show visitors a compelling offer, collect their email address and then market to them with an email auto responder.
I have found if you are trying to get people to buy a product directly from the advert itself it is much trickier to get conversions.
Instead you should be looking at the long term value of an email subscriber.
My Campaign Goals
With that in mind I defined the goals of my Facebook advertising campaign as follows-
Increase email subscribers
Increase Facebook page likes
Pretty straight forward really :)
Setting Up My Email Auto Responder
I used Aweber to create an Email autoresponder which is designed to keep people constantly engaged with my brand consistently extracting value over time (see my Aweber review).
It does this in a number of ways-
The first email asks people to connect with me on social media and introduce themselves – growing my social media following.
The second email asks people how I can help them, I invite them to ask me any question they want on the forum.
This creates new user-generated content on the site,
ranking for long tail keywords. It also creates a strong relationship with new subscribers even if they don’t ask a question.
After that the rest of the email autoresponder sends out 1 of my tutorials from the archives every week.
This means old posts are always getting new traffic, new affiliate clicks, new social signals and new comments which help lead to higher search rankings.
I also have a couple of emails that go out asking people what they like/don’t like about the site and which tutorials they would like me to make next.
Those emails have helped shape the blog’s success.
Click on the image below to see the full sequence-
Putting A Value On An Email Subscriber
As you can see from the above, it is quite difficult to put a money based value on email subscribers. They offer so much more value than just affiliate clicks/sales.
I decided that the easiest way to put a value on an email subscribers is by keeping it simple.
Over the previous 90 day period use Google Analytics to work out what % of traffic came from email.
Then look at the total earnings for that 90 day period using that %. Finally divide it by how many email subscribers you have.
So for example if you had-
40% visitors came from email
$10,000 profit
200 email subscribers
The calculation would look like this-
40% of $10,000 = $4,000
$4,000 / 200 email subscribers = $20 per subscriber
Using that calculation above I have determined that each subscriber is worth $17.81 to me over 90 days.
Now I know that isn’t an exact science and just provides a rough guideline that only takes how much money you made into account.
What it doesn’t account for is all of the extra value you get from new followers on social media, new user generated content, the long term relationship of helping people, new social signals on old posts & new comments on old posts for the next 12 months.
All of which help you grow organically reaching even more people to push down the email engagement funnel.
Creating A Compelling Offer
Instead of spending a bunch of time creating something unique to offer in exchange for a users email address…
I spent time looking at what content I already had.
After going through my archives I picked out a couple of tutorials that I could convert into a PDF to use as the offer.
That really was all there was to creating the offer!
Creating The Landing Page
The landing page is one of the most critical parts of any campaign.
This can literally make or break the entire campaign.
If you have a poor performing landing page you are going to burn through money quicker than you can blink.
I used LeadPages to create my landing page. They provide easy to modify time tested templates to ensure your landing page delivers high conversion rates.
I have put together a quick tutorial showing you how to use LeadPages to setup your mobile responsive landing page, split tests and even publish your landing page as a Facebook tab.
Video Transcript
So this is the back end of lead pages. As you can see here there’s lots of different templates to pick from and they’re all in different categories here and you can also sort them by conversion rates so the best converting templates are at the top.
Now when you first get started, you need to add your email service integration or your webinar as you can see it supports lots of different services here. I’ve got Aweber integrated which is my email provider of choice and once you’ve done that you can create your first lead page.
Now lead pages does have lots of other functions like lead boxes and lead links and I’m not really going to go into those because it’s not relevant to the Facebook tutorial here. Creating your first lead page, you just simply pick which design you want, hit use this template and then the template editor will appear. So instead of creating a new page, I’m just going to show you one of my existing lead pages and you can get a good feel for just how easy it is to edit and create pages.
So this is one of the ones I use in my campaign and you know it’s really easy to change things. It’s just a text editor, you can just change that to get your free copy clicking on that you can change the words here, you can perhaps make it italic or underline it, change the colour, etc. etc. Whatever you want to do.
And it’s all this is very easy. What you see is what you get interface. You have lots of different options down in the left side so you can click through things like that. You can decide whether the privacy text is displayed or if you want to change the background you can go through your old images or upload a new image there. It really is that easy.
Once you’ve finished configuring your page, you just hit save and then publish. And straight away you can start using it. But what I like to do is set up a split test so to do that in lead pages is really easy. All you do is click up here and click on add new variation. Then you can choose to add in a new variation based on your original page which is what we see in the background here or we can go and use a completely different template entirely.
So I’ve done that and you can see I already have some variations here so here’s the original. We have variation 1 here which is just a different background image and variation 2 here. So what lead pages automatically does is any time someone views this, they see one of these at random and it measures which ones of these designs converts better. And I will show you that in a moment. But once your lead pages is set up and you have got alternative lead pages in here, you just need to hit publish.
Now you’ve got a couple of different options here. You can either just have lead pages host the pages directly here or you can install the lead pages wordpress plug in and have it appear as a page on your wordpress page, or you can have it actually appear as a tab on your facebook pages so let’s just take a look at those quickly.
So we can see up here this is the lead pages hosted page. You can also install wordpress plug in here which allows you to actually publish it under your own Url and you can decide what that URL is. Or you can actually publish as a tab on your facebook page so if we look here this is live you can go check this out for yourself, you can see this lead page that I created for Facebook which invites people to become a fan and if they hit download now, there’s an email opt in form right there on my Facebook page and tab.
So lead pages makes it really easy to publish your page anywhere you want and on top of that regardless whether you use a lead page hosted one, the wordpress hosted one or the facebook hosted one it will actually go through and split test those based on what you set up in lead pages. So any changes that you make to your design or this split test you can add and remove variations here. As soon as you hit save and publish, all of those will be updated for you, whether it’s on your blog, your facebook page, and so on.
So last but not least, we want to take a look at how our lead page and split test is performing so we can just click on analytics here.
Down here is the table that you really want to look at. We can see exactly which one is converting at which percentage and right now I can see that the original is converting the best at 38% and this version is converting the worst at 33%. So what we can actually do is say Ok well in that case I want you to show 75% of the visitors the best converting page and the other 25% the traffic distribute between these two to carry on testing. Or you can choose to just delete this variation because it’s not performing very well and add some other variations back in with the editor itself.
So that is lead pages and I hope you can see why it is so easy to work with and I’ve been using it a lot more across lots of different campaigns recently. So there you have it that’s how you create a high converting split tested lead page.
This is the first landing page I created in LeadPages – it took me the best part of 5 minutes to put together.
Pretty clear, simple & straight to the point.
Setting Up My Split Test
In order to optimise the campaign as much as possible I spent 10 minutes creating a couple of alternative landing pages to split test against the page above.
Exactly the same as the original except a different background image-
Landing Page Version 3
Exactly the same as the original except a different background image-
Split Test Results
Just to highlight the importance of landing pages and split testing I wanted to share the results of the split test now.
Here is a screenshot from LeadPages showing you the performance of each landing page above-
As you can see the original is converting at 38% while version 3 is only converting at 33%. That makes a huge difference on the bottom line of the campaign.
With this data in hand I can take the winner and split test that against completely different templates, new background images or just by tweaking the copy.
The ‘Thank You’ Page
Once a user has hit the landing page and entered their email address, we need to take them to a final page in their journey.
Generally people use the ‘Thank You’ page for delivering the offer. But I’m also using it to generate new Facebook subscribers & affiliate sales.
This is what my ‘Thank You’ page looks like-
Nothing complicated, just simple & straight to the point!
Creating Your Facebook Advertising Campaign
Now we have everything we need to create our Facebook advertising campaign and start generating new subscribers instantly.
All we need to do now is-
Create a tracking pixel
Create Facebook campaign
Create Facebook ads
Once that is done you will have everything you need to orchestrate a high performing Facebook marketing campaign!
You can change that to be the value of each new email subscriber/conversion. So every time someone clicks your Facebook ad and converts, it gets reported in the back end of Facebook.
Sometimes this doesn’t work though, for example according to Facebook I had 456 new subscribers – but there were actually 496 in Aweber so just use this as a guideline.
Creating A Facebook Advertising Campaign
When your creating your campaign & adverts you should make sure you are using the Power Editor.
This is much easier to work with than the standard interface and gives you a lot more control over things.
I have created a quick video showing you how to create your first Facebook campaign using the power editor-
Subscribe to my YouTube Channel Now –>
Video Transcript
This is what the Facebook power editor looks like and before you do anything you must first of all download the power editor and what this does is it downloads your Facebook advertising account into the power editor for us to tweak and edit and change, create campaigns and adverts and such things. Once you have done that you must always upload changes after you have finished with the power editor or anything you have done will be lost.
So the power editor, we download data to the power editor and creating our first campaign is really easy. Just click on campaign here and we have a few options. First of all we need to give it a name, so I’m just going to call it tutorial for this example. Then you need to decide if it’s an auction or a fixed price campaign. Now I have always used the auction based campaigns, I haven’t actually tried out the fixed price campaigns and I’ve had great results with the auction. So I would suggest that is the option you go with.
For your budget, you can either set a daily or lifetime budget and then you just need to set campaign start and end dates so I’m just going to put those into the future a little bit so the campaign doesn’t actually start.
And once that is done you then need to move on to creating your adverts.
Once you have created your Facebook advertising campaign you need to create some adverts.
This is really easy to do and I suggest you create a couple of different adverts targeting different audiences to test which works best.
Learn how to do all of that and more with this video-
Subscribe to my YouTube Channel Now –>
Video Transcript
So with your campaign setup, we can now create some adverts. If you just click on the advert tab here and click create advert, this is very simple to do.
First thing we need to do is give it an advert name. Now I have decided that I’m going to target five different groups of people and use three different adverts to test which is the best advert. So one of my target groups are people who are interested in blogspot so I will call this blogspot slash ad 1 and this helps me differentiate not only the target audience with blogspot but also which ad they are seeing, ad 1.
The objective you have a few different choices here and because we’re trying to get conversions you’d think we’d click website conversions but I actually go with clicks to website. It seems to work out much cheaper and using lead pages to optimize a landing page really takes care of the conversion cost.
Next you need to pick your actual Facebook page from this drop down here. Then we need to actually create the advert itself. Now you can use posts of being previously published on your page and just promote those directly which is a nice easy way to do things. Or you can create a new unpublished post which doesn’t appear on your page but is only used in the adverts and that is what I have done and if we look here you see these ones with blue circles, these mean they aren’t published on the page and we can see some of my older adverts here that I have experimented with.
So if you want to create a new post, you just click on create new unpublished post link and you get this pop up here. Now just to explain what each of these fields actually do. This here is the URL you want to send people to, where you want them to actually go. This is the post text here, is what appears here in this area. And as you can see I have included a link with it in my post text. Now the problem with that is that Facebook doesn’t actually track the conversions if people click on that link but it does mean that you actually get more clicks because there are more things for people to click on.
So include a link in your post text, just be aware that won’t be tracked as a conversion if people visit through that. The call to action button is here and you have a number of choices in this drop down. The link headline is what you see here. The display link is the link that appears underneath there and the description is just this short description here. And then you can also choose to upload an image which is pretty self-explanatory there.
So that’s what createing a post looks like and how you do it. So once you have created your advert and I’m just going to use a pre existing one here, you can choose to add URL tags on the end, anyone who’s using Google Analytics campaign tracking here is the place to add your tracking URLS. We need to enable conversion tracking and then select the conversion tracking pixel that we created before so let’s give that a tick like that.
Placement decides where our advert appears. Now there’s two areas it can appear. It can appear directly in people’s newsfeeds or tucked away in the right column and you can see what the adverts look like here.
Now personally my site has about 90% desktop traffic and about 10% mobile traffic so in this example I’m only focusing on desktop traffic. Secondary to that, I found I get much better performance in the newsfeed than the right column but you can split test this. In this example I’m going to pick newsfeed, desktop only that’s what I’m targeting there.
Moving on, we then need to define our audience. Who are the people we are trying to target so you can add in a range of locations here and personally, I remove the location. I want anyone that is 18 and above, any gender, they must speak English of some type and here is where the magic really happens. You can actually pick more demographics you know like where they’re working and their education level, their relationship status and things like that but I leave this quite wide open. And in the interests I just go through and think about what type of interest people would have and define my audience that way. So anyone interested in the blogspot blogging platform, the free blogging platform provided by Google is likely to be interested in my advert so they’re one of my target interests there.
Now I don’t use this but this might be relevant to some guys. You can even target things like if the person is in a new job, if the person is in a serious relationship, if their birthday is in a week, you can target things like if they’re parents and how old their children are, you can target whether they’re currently traveling or currently intending to travel to Italy, and there’s a bunch of things here you can pick from. But for me, I like to keep it quite broad. I know anyone interested in blogspot will be interested in how to build a successful blog. It’s pretty simple there.
The only other thing I set here is I want to target users who aren’t already connected to my Facebook page so that ensures I’m reaching new people. Last but not least, optimization and pricing. By default it’s going to use some default bids here, I always set my click bid to be $5. Manually set up bids, clicks $5 and actions to $0 like so. Now you’ll never pay anywhere near $5 per click, I think I’m paying like 50 cents, sometimes it’s cheaper like 15 cents, sometimes a dollar. It’s just a guideline amount and the reason why we don’t bid on actions is what Facebook deems is an action is a like or a share or a comment and things like that and really we just want people to click on the advert and hit our high converting landing page so we are bidding specifically for clicks and once you’ve done that, that is your advert set up. We do need to add countries here so I’m going to keep it broad, United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and so on, you get the idea.
Now once you’ve set up your advert like this we would ideally like to target the same audience but with a different advert so we can measure which advert performs best. We want an advert that gets the lowest cost per click and highest amount of engagement so we need to set up a couple of tests in order to do that.
What I would do as this point is simply click on the advert we have just created and duplicate it. Click OK and there we can see our advert is duplicated so this time I’m going to rename it to just blogspot ad 2 and simply down here we are going to pick a different advert which looks like that. And that is it. That is all you need to change and those two adverts now will automatically get split tested between our target audience for us to see exactly which one is going to perform better. Now if we want it to expand that out and target people that are also interested in WordPress with the same two adverts you can just highlight both of these, click duplicate and click on OK.
And now we just need to rename this one to WordPress Ad 1,come to our audience tab and remove the blogspot interest and change that to a wordpress interest. Just do the same thing for the other advert that we duplicated and we first of all need to rename it to wordpress ad 2. And then change the audience again from blogspot to wordpress. And that is it so right now we have a campaign set up targeting people who are either interested in blogspot or wordpress and we’re also testing which of the two ads are more effective. With all of that in place you can then just upload your changes which is done now and that is it.
If you jump back to the normal facebook ads interface we can see our new campaign is set up here along with all of our adverts which is pretty cool. Now one thing I’d like to just show you quickly is the reporting here. It doesn’t really show you how it’s performing in terms of leads and such things and if I just show you the custom report I’ve made you’ come to reports here and we’ll have a look at this one.
Here we can look at the exact cost per lead, spends, leads conversions and unique cost per click and all of this important data and the way you create a report like this. If you just come back to your campaign, you can click here to get a full report and within this report itself you can just click on edit columns and go through and tick which metrics you want. So we just want the advert name, we want to know how many impressions it’s had, the CPM, we want to know how many unique clicks, the unique click through rate and the cost per click. We want to know about not necessarily the actions but we want to know about lead conversions and the lead conversion value for example.
So you can have a little play around here and change what columns appear and once you’ve done that you just click on save. In the future to access it, just click on reports, use the reports drop down and select it from there.
So that is how you set up a high performing split test Facebook advertising campaign.
I setup 2 separate Facebook campaigns spending a total of $599.91 generating a total of $17,204.46 based on an email subscribers $17.81 value.
Campaign
Cost
Income
ROI
#1
$300.00
$8,883.76
2,851%
#2
$299.91
$8,370.70
2,691%
Campaign #1 Details
I set everything up as above and targeted 4 different audience types – blogging, blogspot, wordpress & people who had liked my competitors.
I created 3 different adverts for each of the 4 audiences to see which advert converted best for which audience.
These are what the 3 adverts look like – AD1, AD2 & AD3.
Campaign #1 Performance
This table summarises the performance of each advert and the campaign as a whole-
Ad
Cost Per Lead
Spend
Clicks
Cost Per Click
Click Through Rate
Page Likes
#1
$0.94
$45.43
224
$0.24
0.87%
23
#2
$0.69
$232.02
1,236
$0.20
1.60%
164
#3
$0.35
$22.55
103
$0.28
0.66%
13
Totals
$0.66
$300.00
1,563
$0.24
1.05%
200
The $300 spend resulted in-
496 new subscribers
200 new Facebook page likes
Making for a total of new subscriber value of $8,883.76 or 2,851% ROI.
Campaign #2 Details
Exactly the same as the previous campaign except this time-
I took the best performing ad from the previous campaign (AD2) & created 2 new ads (AD4 & AD5)
I took the best performing LeadPages landing page from the previous campaign & created 2 new variations
I added 2 new audiences – people interested in SEO & people attending internet marketing conferences
I was looking to increase conversion while reaching new audiences at the same time.
This is what the 3 adverts looked like, AD2, AD4 & AD5-
Campaign #2 Performance
This table summarises the performance of each advert and the campaign as a whole-
Ad
Cost Per Lead
Spend
Clicks
Cost Per Click
Click Through Rate
Page Likes
#2
$0.54
$54.47
336
$0.18
1.14%
48
#4
$1.17
$48.09
279
$0.19
0.96%
23
#5
$0.66
$197.35
1,201
$0.17
1.60%
101
Totals
$0.79
$299.91
1,816
$0.18
1.23%
172
The $299.91 spend resulted in-
470 new subscribers
172 new Facebook page likes
Making for a total of new subscriber value of $8,370.70 or 2,691% ROI.
As you can see I was able to reduce the cost per click and increase the click through rate.
However the cost per lead was higher as the new landing page designs didn’t really work out.
But that does mean I now have all the data I need to fine tune the entire funnel end to end!
How To Reduce Your Facebook Advertising Cost
If you were paying close attention to the results above, then you will have noticed that in each campaign – some adverts performed better than others.
For example in Campaign #1 one of the adverts produced leads at a cost of $0.94 each – but in the same campaign, a different advert produced leads at $0.35 each.
The only difference between the adverts was the image that I used. This is why it is important to split test your adverts to try and reduce your Facebook advertising cost.
You can see this again with Campaign #2 where one advert was producing leads at $1.17 each, but another advert in the same campaign was producing leads for $0.54 each.
That is a huge saving and can make a huge difference in how much it costs to advertise on Facebook.
Whatever you do, make sure that you split test your adverts – this is the best way to advertise on Facebook for maximum performance with minimal budget.
Wrapping It Up
So there you have it, how to advertise on Facebook step by step! Facebook marketing can’t really get any easier than that!
There are lots of different ways for you to take advantage of Facebook advertising. Building your email list is just one of them.
Take what you have learnt here and get creative with your own campaigns!
If you have any extra tip & tricks let me know in the comments or if you have any questions about how to advertise on Facebook please feel free to ask!
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If you have never advertised on Facebook before then you can get a $50 advertising coupon.
Some webhosts like A2Hosting include these free of charge with their shared hosting accounts, read my A2 Hosting review for more info.
But if you don’t already have one you can just buy one from Fiverr for $5 to reduce your Facebook advertising cost & test the waters!