by If you are struggling with Facebook ads, then this post is for you. You may have tried Facebook ads in the past and felt like you wasted money and got zero results. Trust me we have all been there. Earlier last year I wrote a detailed post on this blog explaining the exact process we use to get 40 new subscribers signed up per day from Facebook ads.
(Search this blog if you want to read that post)
Since I made that post we have done a serious amount of testing and we have managed to get thousands of new customers signed up via Facebook ads. So I have decided to make a follow-up post in the hope it helps more people. This post is part 2 and can be used to improve your marketing efforts or it can be your guide to diagnose why your Facebook ads aren’t working and what changes you should make.
Let’s face it Facebook ads can be frustrating at the best of times, but for the majority of online businesses, they are vital if you want to succeed. Facebook is still the biggest social media platform in the world and is one of the most widely used websites in general, so more than likely your ideal customer is hanging around waiting to be sold to.
So let’s get into it and improve your ad performance.
1. Choosing the correct objective
This is where I see so many people go wrong when setting up their Facebook ads. They love to boost a post from their page in the hope it will start getting sales. I can ensure you that if you do this, for the most part, it is like flushing money down the toilet. 99% percent of the time you are going to be picking the conversion objective. When you do this and you optimise for purchases that is telling Facebook to go out and find the people who are most likely to buy from you. If you pick engagement that is telling Facebook to go out and find the people who are most likely to interact with your post. People who buy and people who spy are completely different kinds of people and you don’t want to be wasting money optimizing for people that spy. So to do this correctly you must set up your ads directly from the ads manager and select the conversion objective.
2. Giving your ads sufficient budget
In my opinion, the days of putting a $5 daily budget on your ads and getting results are completely finished. Ad prices are rising all the time and you need to think about this logically. Your CPA price could be anything from $10-$50 so if you are only putting a daily budget of $5 on your ads you probably won’t convert anybody. You also want to get as much data back from Facebook as quickly as you can to see what is working and what isn’t and unfortunately, with a very low budget, you won’t learn much. Make sure there is sufficient budget to get results.
3. Structuring Your Campaign Correctly.
This brings me to the next point. I see a lot of people run into trouble with their ads because they don’t structure their campaign correctly. Unless you are running a CBO campaign the budget is controlled at the ad set level. So you need to ensure you understand this and layout the campaign correctly.
Here’s what the typical cold traffic campaign will look like
(Cold Campaign)
5 – 10 ad sets within the campaign
At least 4 ads per ad set with a mixture of video and image.
You will notice I said at least 4 ads per ad set. This is very important. The Facebook algorithm operates through machine learning. This means you need to give it a few different options to test. If you only put out 1 ad per ad set you aren’t giving it the opportunity to test different ads and learn which one converts the best. When you do something like this you probably won’t see any sales or if you do normally the CPA will be very very high and it won’t be profitable.
4. Targeting the wrong people
When you are starting out and going in completely cold you will need to do a lot of testing to try and find your ideal customer on Facebook. You should spend some time putting together some customer avatars. In BusterBox we know exactly who our target demographic is and it is split into a few different sections. We didn’t learn this information overnight. We did a lot of testing and sent out a lot of surveys. Here’s the type of information you are looking for.
· Gender
· Age
· Interests
· Demographic
· Location.
Here’s an example for you. Say you are running a baseball box. The worst mistake you can make is head over to your ads manager and just target people who like baseball. That is extremely lazy and I can guarantee you will not get good results from it. As I previously mentioned you should create a few customer avatars and test them, here’s an example of one.
Mom who’s child loves Baseball
· Gender (Female)
· Age 35- 50
· Interests – Baseball, engaged shopper,
Subscriptions boxes
· Parent with a child between the ages of 8 – 15
· Location the US
That is a very, very basic customer avatar but I hope it twigs something in your mind and you get the point I am trying to make. Eventually, once you start getting some traction you will be able to build lookalike audiences of your customers. That is when things get a lot easier and the CPA will come down dramatically. Unfortunately, when starting off, though this isn’t possible and you have to do what I call the dirty work. Don’t be afraid of surveying people either and trying to build your customer avatars that way. I have done that multiple times in the past for product launches and it worked
5. Your Copy and ad creative aren’t good enough.
You can be the biggest expert on the planet at setting up a Facebook ads campaign, but if your creative is crap then you won’t get any results. Coming up with a good ad requires a lot of skill and testing to pull off. You will need to practice and spend some time studying different ads to do this. One of my tips would be to go to the Facebook ad library and take a look at some of your competitions ads. If you see the ad is running for a good amount of time, then you will know more than likely it is a profitable ad. You can then take a screenshot of it and save it in a folder. Do this with lots of different subscription boxes and you will get a good idea of what works and what doesn’t work.
You also need to ensure you have good images and good videos for your ads. A lot of the time I see blurry videos and images where you can’t even see what is in the box. You need to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and try to imagine what would make you buy. A blurry image of a box of junk certainly isn’t going to get anybody excited enough to actually purchase from you. Your images should be clear and the boxes should be packed with colourful items. If you are going to include a human in your images well then make sure they are smiling. This can make a big difference and grab attention on the Newsfeed. Likewise, when you are including videos in your ads they should be short and snappy with a quick walk-through of your box. In the video, the person doing the walkthrough should sound extremely excited to have signed up for your box.
The last thing you want is a blurry video showing off a box of rubbish with the person doing the video sounding like they are about to fall asleep. Trust me, if you do this you won’t sell anything. You don’t need an expensive camera to do this. Your phone is perfect and makes the experience more authentic as it will look like a genuine customer video if done correctly.
Now the final piece of the puzzle is your ad copy
(This is the text and headline of the ad)
This isn’t something that can be learned overnight and it takes genuine practice and skill to get good at this. A good copywriter will cost thousands to hire as they know their value. A good copywriter can completely change your business overnight, but unless you have thousands to spend you better start learning this stuff yourself. You need to truly understand your customer to know what kind of copy will pull on that customer’s emotional triggers and persuade them to convert. A good subscription box entrepreneur will be an excellent direct response marketer and will have the ability to play on a prospects emotions and come up with an unbelievable offer to get that person to sign up. They will then be able to increase their marketing efforts and sign thousands of people up. Like any skill, though it takes time to learn copywriting and if you want to be successful in this game it is 100% essential. A good place to start would be by reading some Dan Kennedy Books and taking it from there. You need to be prepared and accept that there will be a lot of testing with this and you probably won’t get it right the first few times you launch your ads.
I hope this article helps anyone having trouble with their Facebook ads and gives them an idea of where to start troubleshooting their problems. If anybody has any questions about Facebook ads or Subscription boxes in general, please let me know and I would be happy to help.
