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How to Drive More Website Traffic with Facebook Ads

You are here because

  • You want to increase your online or local sales.
  • You are interested to promote your app.
  • You want to raise awareness about your brand.
  • You have specific business goals to achieve.

Before you go further, I must say that Facebook Ads are the right tools to use.

Let me tell you why:

I am sure you already know that Facebook is the leading social media enterprise around. What you might not know is the following:

Download my Cheat Sheet to drive more website traffic with facebook ads.


Facebook generated revenue of 10.9 billion dollars from advertisements in 2014. It is predicted that this revenue will increase to 17.2 billion dollars in 2016. That is more than 150% of earnings in 2014.

Facebook generated revenue of 10.9 billion dollars from advertisements in 2014.

But how does it benefit you?

Imagine a company that has more than 800 million daily active users on PCs, tablets, laptops and mobile devices. Now consider the fact that 71% of online adults use Facebook daily. And add 70% of all teens aging 13 to 17 who use Facebook daily.

What if I tell you that about 70% of these people are customers looking for special offers, services and deals? This definitely sparks curiosity, doesn’t it?

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It will also come handy to know that 92% of marketers advertise on Facebook.

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Why not grab a big chunk of these potential visitors, clients and customers to benefit your business.

How?

Using Consumer Psychology and Facebook Advertisement

Let’s get started:

How to Advertise on Facebook

Create Facebook Ads Based on Your Business Goals!

Whether you are looking for customers, traffic or conversions, it is always necessary that you know your business and your target audience.

Facebook Adverts make it easy for us to accomplish this in a few clicks.

While this post will share details about creating ads, driving traffic and increasing conversion rates, you should also read our post about creating the best performing Facebook ads ever.

We continue as follows:

  • How to create Facebook ads that Convert 
  • Best Facebook ad Campaigns – How to manage them.
  • How to Drive Traffic to Your Website with Facebook
  • Facebook ads Conversion Rate
  • Conclusion

Also look at 8 sure fire ways to increase engagement on Facebook.

How to Create Facebook ads that Convert

Facebook Advertising Tip – Choose Your Objective

I bet you know how to log into Facebook and reach “Create Ads” page. Follow the screenshot below:

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You will notice that Facebook asks you to choose your objective.

Since you are interested in driving traffic to your website using Facebook Ads, select the first option that says “send people to your website” and enter your website URL to promote.

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Click “Create Ad Account”.

Tracking Clicks and Facebook ads Conversion Rate

Your next step is to create Facebook Pixel. This is a piece of JavaScript code for your website to measure, optimize and build audiences for your ad campaign.

Facebook Pixel helps you to

– Measure how your customers are moving between devices before they convert.

– Optimize and ensure that your ads are being seen by people who are most likely to take the actions you want them to take.

– Automatically build audiences for website visitors to re-target.

It is strongly recommended that you create Facebook Pixel and use the JavaScript code to get the most out of Facebook Adverts.

Enter Your Account Info

It is time to tell Facebook your account country, currency and time-zone. Be careful as your ads billing and reporting data will be recorded in this currency and time zone.

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Facebook ad Tip – Choosing the Right Audience

World Wide Web does not necessarily mean that you can advertise to anyone around the world and become successful.

It is crucial on Facebook to target the right audience. Let’s see what I mean:

Suppose that you have a gaming website to promote using Facebook Ads. I recommend you to research gamer demographics: Their age and gender, etc.

Clearly, it is most unlikely that you want people above 50 viewing your adverts. A better approach would be to display your ads to an age-group below 40 or 50.

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On the other hand, you would certainly like to target the 35+ age-group if your business audiences are the Fortune 500 CEOs as more than 70% of those professionals are above 35.

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Similarly, if you are a restaurant owner in the East Coast interested in increasing traffic and conversions to your restaurant’s website, you don’t want people from the West Coast viewing your adverts. They are very unlikely to order food from you. Even if they do so, I am sure you won’t be in a position to deliver a hot supper in time 😉

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What do I mean and how is it connected to our discussion?

After getting your account info, Facebook wants you to choose your target audience. This is where your Facebook Ad Campaign’s fate gets decided.

The following screenshot shows what Facebook wants to know:

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Some Sensible Decisions to Make

The right way of choosing a location is to know your business first. If you are a local business serving people in a specific town, you may go down to the zip code level to target the right audience.

I cannot emphasize how important this section is.

Also look at these 10 social media marketing mistakes you want to avoid.

Imagine a company selling headphones to skaters and not specifying the right age-group. Or a company selling birth-control pills to women and not specifying gender.

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Those are simple examples….

You will surely have to put a lot of time in research to identify your target audiences.

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Interests and Categories

This is where the power of Facebook comes into play. Choosing the right interests and categories will be a win-win situation for your website.

You can make right selections and hit the jackpot. Or get some really wrong entries to mess everything up.

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Facebook offers a lot of neat suggestions to select interests and categories.

Start by specifying a broad category that fits your target audience. This will highlight your adverts among masses.

Simultaneously narrow down the specifics with precise interests. This will lead more targeted traffic to your website that converts.

What Sets Facebook Ads Apart

The vast targeting offered by Facebook helps you to reach the right customer at the right time.

– Location

– Age

– Gender

– Languages

– Relationship

– Education

– Work

– Financial

– Home

– Ethnic Affinity

– Generation

– Parents

– Politics (U.S. only)

– Life Events

– Interests

– Behaviors

– Connections

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What if you want to attract audiences wishing to buy gifts for themselves or their loved-ones on a specific occasion like birthday or (say) marriage anniversary.

You will get instant conversions by offering discounts and deals on such life-events.

Once you define the right audiences for your adverts, Facebook allows you to save your selected choices for future use.

I recommend that you save your audience. This will help you in future when you are creating other ads for your products and websites.

How much does it cost to advertise on Facebook

Facebook allows you to either set a daily budget or a life-time budget.

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Budgeting is not only about selecting one of these two options, it is about making the right decision so that you don’t end-up paying too much. This is where I can help…

Let’s save you some bucks:

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Before we move any further, you must have answers to the following questions:

– What amount are you spending on other advertising channels?

– What are the business goals that you want to achieve?

– This may sound crazy, but are you familiar with products / services that you are promoting?

– How much will you make on average if a product is purchased from your website. And what is the lifetime value for your products / services?

– What market are you targeting?

Here we go:

Let’s assume that a company’s lifetime value is roughly $400 on average. And the first purchase is averaged at $70 – with $29 on the low end.

This tells us that if the company pays $29 for a new client, it is guaranteed to break even every time.

Here’s how you end-up winning:

Paying $29 for every new client breaks even in the shorter run. Whereas, the company makes profit in a long span as the average first purchase is around $70.

Do you see how you are winning if you follow this rule of thumb?

But budgeting in Facebook Ads is a little complicated.

Also look at 7 Facebook advertising cost secrets.

Now look at another example:

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Above, you can see that an average amount of $36 is being paid for every new client in the retargeting campaign, which is really good.

What’s important is the fact that some ads are doing really well. They are making over $8 per new client. But there are ads that are not producing any new clients at all. That’s why we see $0.00 in that column.

Compare the above with the following:

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You can certainly notice that this is not a retargeting campaign. But it is interesting to see how this campaign outperforms the previous one. The cost per new client is $57.

Once again, highlighted details reveal that many ads are not contributing to the income.

This big difference needs critical analysis and is beyond the scope of this post. I recommend reading “Facebook Advertising Costs: What’s the Right Budget for Your Goals?” for details.

Cost of advertising on Facebook in a Nutshell

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Daily budgeting is useful if you want your ad set to run throughout the day. This means that Facebook paces your spending per day. You must keep in mind that Facebook has set $1.0 as the minimum amount for daily budget. Plus, it must be two times your CPC.

Lifetime budget means that Facebook will pace your spending over the period you sent for the ad to run. This means that your Facebook Advertisement runs for a specified length of time.

Be Smart:

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I suggest that you invest sufficient time to research about budgeting adverts. This post will definitely help you in driving traffic to your website and making the clicks convert, but you want to end-up making significant profits.

Follow the example shared above to get started. Experiment and learn to see what helps…

Creating Your most Effective Facebook ads

Facebook asks you to choose how you want your ad to appear. It gives you options to choose links and images for your advert and offers you an ad preview as well.

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It must be intuitively clear that everything from the ad display style – single image or multiple images – to text and links including headline, description and description URL will play a pivotal role in your campaign’s success.

This is where your creativity and business smartness comes in. Let’s learn about ad content and design by looking at some famous fails:

Facebook ad examples

Best Facebook Ad Example 1:

This is how you can push your customers away easily. Just tell them that using your product they will start looking sexy.

Did you get it?? Subway was – in a way – telling female customers that they were ugly and they needed to eat at subway to become sexy for Halloween.

Message to learn:

You don’t want to send any negative message through your Facebook Ad. This applies to messages shared in images and texts both.

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Best Facebook Ad Example 2 :

Look at all the aspects while creating image adverts. Even if you are getting them done by an expert, inspect those ads carefully and look for any wrong messages they may give.

Esurance unwillingly advertised: “Cover your home in a dick”

Message to learn:

Not all fonts are made equal. Some may click while others might look like dick. Use good fonts

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Best Facebook Ad Example 3:

I will not comment more and give you a simple message straight away:

If your audiences are children, get their honest opinion before publishing your ad. Same goes for any other age group.

McDonalds wanted to attract children, but they rather got scared by the mascot.

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Bottom Line:

Your ad image must be in high-quality. It must be designed to share a positive message without any negative tone attached. Getting it done by professionals is a big plus.

Keep in mind that you want to “send people to your website” and to make them convert.

Headline text and description must convey same message as the image. Both must be convincingly done so that your product is highlighted positively; increasing traffic and conversions.

Also remember that whatever goes on Facebook stays there for a long time. You definitely want your content (images and text) to be ever-green.

Read about Facebook Ads – Image, Title and Ad Text. Create one that always looks lively and new.

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Remember that your ad must be optimized for desktop and mobile devices. Be sensible about these.

Last but not least, remember to associate your ad with a Facebook page.

Once you are done creating your ad, you can review it and place order.

Wait, we are not done:

Managing Facebook Ad Campaign

Placing an ad on Facebook does not guarantee traffic or conversions. It simply means that you are displaying your product to Facebook users and (maybe) getting “some” traffic.

Next step is to manage your adverts in order to drive more traffic and to increase conversion rate.

You may also be interested in these 8 killer SEO strategies that promise targeted traffic. Or perhaps in the ultimate guide on how to build a high converting landing page.

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Don’t Rely On A Single Facebook Ad Campaign

Facebook users will be viewing your ad again and again. And you don’t want them to get bored by that.

Imaging what will happen if you are repeatedly shown same content. Won’t you start ignoring it after some time? Same happens with every other Facebook user. And you don’t want people to ignore your advert.

What’s the solution?

Create more ads. Facebook is smart enough to identify which of your adverts work the best.

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Never leave your campaigns on auto-pilot. Keep monitoring…

If you notice that an advert is not producing expected results, replace it with another one that you have already created. That’s the benefit of having multiple adverts.

Remember that Facebook offers a really neat Ad Management Dashboard which provides an overview of your ad campaigns. It shares statistics of how much you are spending daily, your campaign reach and other useful metrics like social reach, frequency, clicks and connections, etc.

Take a tour through the Facebook Ads Manager. Also look at Facebook Power Editor, which is a tool designed for larger advertisers who need to create lots of ads at once and have precise control of their campaigns.

Remember that posting frequently on Facebook does not guarantee traffic or conversions.

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There is no defined rule to follow in this regard, and that’s why I have asked you to constantly monitor your campaign.

Let’s conclude by looking at a couple of Facebook Ad Campaign success stories.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Website with Facebook

You must have a story to tell. This gives people on social media (i.e. Facebook) a reason to trust your product.

This is where the Facebook Page I hinted earlier comes in. Share your story and share your goals.

This is what The Wonderful Food Company did. They are local, organic and fresh farm producers.

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Facebook helped The Wonderful Food reach and engage with people more deeply, which helped us build a reputation for bringing high quality organic products to people that they can trust. Facebook will continue to be a key part of our branding and marketing plans – Maggie Chen, CEO, The Wonderful Food

The company shared up to 4 posts daily featuring information about recipes and products. It shared blogs that told emotional stories behind its products, which helped in increasing traffic and conversions.

Results:

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Facebook ads Conversion Rate

Let’s see how I Want That Course’s agency Three Monkeys Media ran a targeted cross-platform lead generation campaign on Facebook that used a wide variety of ad formats to send the right people to the website.

To cement the company’s brand reputation and guide people towards registering, the media team showed video ads to people who had already shown an interest in a course. The 15-second teaser video featured a beauty course and encouraged people to change their lives by enrolling.

Next, Three Monkeys Media created a Custom Audience of people who watched the first video and retargeted them with link ads, carousel ads or a second video ad (this time containing a call to action). The link ads helped drive people to I Want That Course’s website, while carousel ads allowed the agency to feature multiple courses in the same ad.

Three Monkeys Media used reach and frequency buying to control when people saw a certain ad. This allowed the agency to tell a sequential story by showing the audience 3 ads in order, which correlated with the 3 main stages of the buying journey.

It used A/B testing to test and optimize the ads daily, which meant it sometimes ran 20 campaigns (each with 2 ad sets and up to 3 ads) at the same time, on both desktop and mobile. With so many ads to manage, the agency saved time by using Power Editor to plan and optimize the ads.

Facebook has been amazing, not only as a platform, but also on a personal level. We formed a close relationship with our Facebook account managers, who went over and above every time. They worked with us to identify and understand our needs and then offered solutions to help us achieve our goals and targets – Michael Sharif, Director, Three Monkeys Media

As a small business, I Want That Course didn’t have a huge library of images to draw on for all the ad variations, so Three Monkeys Media used photos from Facebook’s stock image library for the ad creative. This meant the company was able to direct its budget into running more ads, rather than spending it on photography.

Results:

Untitled38 How to Advertise on Facebook – Conclusion 

First and foremost, you must notice that success comes by treating Facebook as a social hub, not as a business tool.

I am not saying that you don’t need to be business smart. Of course, you better be.

But remember to use social network (Facebook) the way it is meant to be used. Share stories about your products / services and advertise positively. This will bring you traffic and conversions.

You should also try these 10 UX design hacks for increasing conversion.

These 20 powerful twitter strategies to boost your business might come handy as well.

How has your Facebook Ad Campaign been? And what’s your take on driving traffic with Facebook Ads? Share your experience with us…

Nora Flint

Nora Flint

9 Responses

  1. Whoa.. this is a big guide on facebook ads. Facebook ads have given us a tremendous boost in the conversation and ROI. Perhaps, this is a right time to apply some of the strategy you mentioned here.

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